Damon Galgut, The Promise (2021). Damon Galgut is a South African, born in 1963 and living in Cape Town. After being short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2003 and 2010, he won it with The Promise. This is a family saga, extending from the 1980s during apartheid to 2018. When I quoted James Wood on Mrs. Dalloway, I didn’t mention that the words came from a review of The Promise. But they do: after commenting on Woolf, Wood says that Galgut’s “remarkable new novel . . . suggests that the demands of history and the answering cry of the novel can still powerfully converge.” Wood also says, “One is struck, amid the sombre events, by the joyous, puckish restlessness of the storytelling.” A review in The Economist (July 17, 2021) expresses a similar theme: “The novel evolves into a damning commentary on South Africa’s many broken promises; the denouement will make readers feel desolate.