The conceit of telling the story through a series of funerals came to him after a boozy lunch in which a friend “entertained” him with anecdotes about a succession of family funerals: “Oblique angles appeal to me.” The conflict of “the promise” on which the novel rests – the dying wish of the mother that her black servant, Salome, be given the rights to the tiny dilapidated house in which she has lived on the family farm for years – was also inspired by a friend whose family, like the fictional Swarts, “in time-honoured white South African style”, found ways to not follow through on a similar pledge. “A surprising number of novelists are very good few are extraordinary,” began one critic, just warming up. With the exception of a recent “ beating” in the London Review of Books, the novel has been rapturously received. (The family are called Swarts, which means “black” in Afrikaans, “a sort of in-joke”, as he puts it). It might be more JM Coetzee than Richard Curtis, but Galgut’s Four Funerals is surprisingly funny.

Written in an innovative style, The Promise tells the story of a white South African family through the device of four funerals over 40 years, chronicling the decline of post-apartheid South Africa. Slight in person (he’s a committed yogi), the 57-year-old author is serious and courteous in conversation, but the sardonic voice of the novel’s shapeshifting, puckish narrator clearly belongs to him. Obviously it was a great night for the book, so it is hard to be displeased with that.” The ceremony last night felt totally unreal, he says, “as if I’d been hit over the head. He finds the whole thing “deeply disquieting” (his mother has helpfully given his contact details to journalists back in South Africa). He has been shortlisted twice before: in 2003 for The Good Doctor, and in 2010 for In a Strange Room. “I ’m used to not winning – that’s kind of what I’m programmed for, and what I’m braced for,” says the quietly spoken South African novelist Damon Galgut, the morning after he was awarded the Booker prize for his ninth novel, The Promise.

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