In a Strange Room – which was shortlisted for the Booker in 2010, and is by far Galgut’s best novel – is an autofiction in which a man named Damon goes on three journeys in Europe, Africa and India, bearing his nationality like a stain on his back. In The Good Doctor, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2003, a cynical South African doctor is challenged by a naively ideological new colleague. Since the mid 1990s, he has been more willing directly to tackle the legacies of apartheid in his fiction. Both A Sinless Season (1982), a novel of boyhood cruelty set in a young offenders’ prison (Galgut has since disavowed it), and the novella which formed the backbone of his collection Small Circle of Beings (1988) – a stark domestic miniature about a mother caring for her ill child – were precocious and emotionally perceptive, but neither seemed particularly interested in the world outside themselves. His early works were sometimes criticised – like Adam’s poetry – for abnegating their moral responsibilities. The fall of apartheid promised to give South African novelists licence to write, as Galgut said in an interview in 2003, about “things like love … which would have been considered slightly immoral as a theme until apartheid crashed”, but his own novels have only become more politically engaged over the course of his career.

The promise booker