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★ "Galgut extends his extraordinary corpus with a rich story of family, history, and grief."--Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
★ "This tour-de-force unleashes a searing portrait of a damaged family and a troubled country in need of healing."--Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
★ "Galgut's compelling new novel blends characters and history and intricate themes to reveal the devastating impacts of white privilege and institutional racism...The Promise is timely, relevant, and thematically significant."--Booklist (Starred Review)
"The novel carries within it the literary spirits of Woolf and Joyce... To praise the novel in its particulars--for its seriousness; for its balance of formal freedom and elegance; for its humor, its precision, its human truth--seems inadequate and partial. Simply: you must read it."--Claire Messud, Harper's Magazine
"Galgut's novel most closely resembles the work of predecessors like Woolf and Faulkner. The novel's beautifully peculiar narration aerates and complicates this fatal family fable, and turns plot into deep meditation... Galgut is wonderfully, Woolfianly adept."--James Wood, The New Yorker
"The plot is just the vehicle for a story that reveals the dark heart of South Africa's recent and turbulent history; apartheid, conscription, peace and reconciliation are all glossed. In The Promise is a kind of fluid narrativity which means we, the reader, are literally swept along, while Galgut pays a very direct tribute to Joyce in the final cadenced pages. He's done it with mastery, guile, and a generous amount of empathy. The Promise is a masterpiece."--Independent.ie
"Time and again in Mr. Galgut's fiction, South Africa materializes, vast, astonishing, resonant. And on this vastness, he stages intimate dramas that have the force of ancient myth."--Anna Mundow, Wall Street Journal
"The Promise offers all the virtues of realist fiction, plus some extras. A reader can shrug it all off and focus on the family's story, or take pleasure in a brash writer's narrative norm-breaking... In comparison [to Coetzee], Galgut is a gleeful satirist, mordantly skewering his characters' fecklessness and hypocrisy."--Rand Richards Cooper, The New York Times Book Review
