The language is peppered with regional geography, terminology, and slang, with sentences ranging from clipped (“One day, she says aloud. Galgut moves fluidly among accounts of every single major and minor character, his prose unbroken by quotation marks or italics, as though narrated from the perspective of a ghost who briefly possesses every person. The promise is buried along with Rachel, only to be unearthed years later when subsequent family deaths force the Swarts to recollide for the rituals of mourning. Nobody else pays any mind: Amor is 13 years old at the start and functionally voiceless in her family. Only Amor, the youngest daughter, cares about her mother’s dying wish-that Salome, the Swarts’ domestic servant, receive full ownership of the house where she lives with her family, though under apartheid law, Black people are not legally allowed to own property in White areas. Her husband, Manie, and three children, Anton, Astrid, and Amor, are all walloped by different incarnations of grief. Three decades of South African sociopolitical history are woven into a saga of loss and missed opportunity that upends a dysfunctional Afrikaner family living outside Pretoria.
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