Product Description A gripping tale of guilty secrets, betrayal, and racial tension, of isolation and revenge in modern-day South Africa, from the Man Booker Prize—shortlisted author of The Good DoctorWhen Adam moves into the abandoned house on the dusty edge of town, he is hoping to recover from the loss of his job and his home in the city. But when he meets Canning — a shadowy figure from his childhood — and Canning’s enigmatic and beautiful wife, a sinister new chapter in his life begins. Canning has inherited a vast fortune and a giant folly in the veld, a magical place of fantasy and dreams that seduces Adam and transforms him absolutely, violently — and perhaps forever. The Impostor evokes a hot and cruel and claustrophobic world, in which sex and death are never far from the surface. Skilfully interweaving the story of one man’s struggle to regain his moral centre with the disorienting, often tragic effects of massive social and political change, it is Galgut’s most powerful and unforgettable novel yet. From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. In this bleak and thrilling novel, the fifth from Booker Prize–nominee Galgut, the author creates an antipastoral, postapartheid noir that centers around Adam Napier, a depressed poet who retreats to a rural South African town to write. Rather than write, Adam drinks and wallows in depression. The story accelerates once he meets Canning, a former schoolmate who regards Adam as a personal hero even though Adam cannot remember him. As it turns out, Canning is a wealthy businessman with a vendetta against his dead father: he plans to transform an idyllic game preserve his father owned into a golf course. While Canning facilitates business between corrupt politicians and shady businessmen, Adam sinks deeper into a moral quagmire and continues to fail as a poet. At the heart of this tightly wound novel is a story of betrayal—within an individual, among friends and neighbors and within a society. With Adam, Galgut has created a transcendent loser, a contemporary cousin to Bellow's magnificent Tommy Wilhelm in Seize the Day. (Jan.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From The New Yorker Set in post-apartheid South Africa, this gripping novel explores the seamier aspects of reconciliation. Adam, adrift after losing his job to a young black candidate, moves to an isolated town to write poetry. Boredom sets in, relieved only by the appearance of an old school acquaintance, Canning, who invites Adam to spend weekends on his nearby game farm. There Adam meets Canning�s wife, Baby, who is both alluring and chillingly aloof, and begins to realize that no one�s motives are as pure as they appear. Galgut gives even seemingly innocuous details sinister overtones: the clicking of peacocks on a roof, the shuffling steps of Canning�s elderly black servants. Beneath a fairly standard thriller plot (affairs, corruption) runs a critique of contemporary South Africa, from the venality of those enriched by a reinvigorated economy to the stale pieties of the white liberal class. Copyright ©2008 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker From The Washington Post From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com The South Africa in post-apartheid novels of writers such as J.M. Coetzee is populated by disillusioned idealists, corrupt schemers and covert racists; it is a world where the average white man occupies a tenuous place. Firmly entrenched in this tradition arrives Damon Galgut's new novel, The Impostor, the author's follow-up to The Good Doctor, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2003. Just as Coetzee's Disgrace begins in a city and ends on a remote rural farm, so we find in The Impostor a disillusioned man named Adam Napier who has lost his job in Johannesburg to a black worker and has decamped to his brother's broken down country house. Alone there in the dry veldt, he intends to resume his lo