The Impostor

'This is a novel about a country's transition and its moral effects, and it is absolutely brilliant.' The Times When Adam moves into the abandoned house on the dusty edge of town, he is hoping to recover from the loss of his job and his home in the city. But when he meets Canning - a shadowy figure from his childhood - and Canning's enigmatic and beautiful wife, a sinister new chapter in his life begins. Canning has inherited a vast fortune and a giant folly in the veld, a magical place of fantasy and dreams that seduces Adam and transforms him absolutely, violently - and perhaps forever. Damon Galgut's magnificent new novel evokes a hot and cruel and claustrophobic world, in which sex and death are never far from the surface. 'The Impostor works on several different levels. In one sense, it is a conventional crime caper, the story of an innocent man who gets sucked into a world that he doesn't understand. In another, it is a critique of contemporary South Africa, a country that, as Galgut depicts it, is beset with cruelty and a spirit of brutish materialism. But there is a third level on which the novel works, that of the fable or parable... Galgut's plots seem propelled by a logic of their own.' William Skidelsky, Observer'A great pleasure... Damon Galgut has the rare ability to show us how people develop as their perception of each other alters... More gripping and persuasive the further you follow the author on his journey... Damon Galgut's book is the best I have read to come out of the new South Africa.' Allan Massie, Scotsman 'Outstanding... [Galgut is] a major writer worthy to be referred to as a kindred spirit of the great Coetzee... The Impostor, with its bleak balancing of boyhood hopes and adult regret, is a great novel.' Eileen Battersby, Irish Times