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BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. It's a rare thing when a novel attracts so much critical acclaim that a publisher can't fit all the praise onto the back cover.

But that's what's happened with Damon Galgott's The Promise.

The South African novelist's latest work has seen him

heralded as a virtuoso by everyone from Colm to Bean to Dame Joan Bakewell, whose breathless

words of approbation now fill the end papers of his UK edition. And I can't help but agree.

The promise is, quite simply, one of the best books I've read in a decade.

It tells the story of the Swartz, a white Africana family, living on a farm outside Pretoria,

whose changing fortunes over four decades play out against the backdrop of a post-apartheid South Africa.

The novel's title refers to a promise

made by Maney, the patriarch, to his dying wife, Rachel, that he will gift their black maid

Salome the house she lives in on their land. Whether he fulfills this promise or not provides

the propulsive focus of a multi-generational,

multi-voice story, which can perhaps also be read as an allegory for South Africa itself.

The promise is Galgat's ninth book. Two of his previous novels, including The Good Doctor,

have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His last novel, Arctic Summer,

...