Galgut moves to Chatto for new novel

Damon Galgut, twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is moving to Chatto & Windus with his next novel, reuniting him with first UK editor Clara Farmer.

Farmer, Chatto's publishing director, acquired UK Commonwealth rights, excluding South Africa, and audio rights to The Promise from Caroline Wood at Felicity Bryan Associates. Rights have already been sold to Europa in the US and have been snapped up in South Africa, Italy, Germany, France and the Netherlands.

The novel charts the crash and burn of a white South African family, living on a farm outside Pretoria as promises, long-made but unfulfilled, echo through the generations.

It will publish on 17th June 2021 and has already been lavished with praise from fellow authors including Colm Toibín, Tessa Hadley, Patrick Gale, Garth Greenwell, Anna Hope and Edmund White who declared it “the most important book of the past 10 years”.

Galgut is a Cape Town novelist who has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize with 2003's The Good Doctor and 2010's In a Strange Room. His most recent novel, Arctic Summer, was nominated for the Walter Scott and Folio prizes and his fiction, released in the UK up to now by Atlantic, has been published in 16 languages. The film of The Quarry, starring Michael Shannon, was released in 2020.

He said: “The Promise is a departure in voice and style from all my previous work and it seems the right moment to be published afresh by a brilliant new team in the UK. I'm beyond delighted to be re-united with Clara Farmer, who picked up The Good Doctor after it was turned down by several other editors. The support and enthusiasm from Chatto has kept me buoyed up since they bought the book and I look very much forward to the adventure of its appearance in June.’

Farmer said: “It’s a great joy to be reunited with Damon – we first worked together on The Good Doctor, when the directness of his prose, and gift for capturing uncomfortable truths, saw him heralded as a significant new voice in literature. In The Promise, an addictive and gripping story set across four decades, Galgut’s gymnastic deployment of wit, observation and empathy depicts an ever-diminishing family, hell-bent on self-destruction. It’s impossible to turn away from a Galgut novel, such are his powers to draw the reader in; The Promise is set to be Galgut’s most brilliant book yet.”