The Quarry - Softcover

Galgut, Damon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802141617 ISBN 13: 9780802141613

Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat, 2004

Synopsis

A thrilling parable of death and deception from the Booker-shortlisted Galgut. On a lonely stretch of road a man picks up a hitchhiker. The driver is a minister on his way to a new rural congregation. The passenger, a fugitive. When the minister realizes this, the fugitive kills him. He assumes his vestments and identity, only to discover that one of his first duties as the new minister is to preside over his victim's funeral. As the fugitive and the local police chief play a tense game of cat and mouse, culminating in a pursuit across the desolate veldt, Damon Galgut gives us a spare, devastating combat for man’s most prized attribute: freedom.

About this title

About the Author

Damon Galgut was born in Pretoria in 1963 and now lives in Cape Town. He wrote his first novel, A Sinless Season, when he was seventeen. His other books include Small Circle of Beings, The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs and The Good Doctor, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2003.

From Publishers Weekly

In a bleak morality tale about a fugitive from justice, Galgut (The Good Doctor) again demonstrates his flair for charting the vicissitudes of human despair in modern-day South Africa. After the unnamed, near-starving protagonist is picked up by a minister traveling to his next church post, he repays the holy man's generosity by murdering him. The desperado quietly slips into the minister's role and tries to assimilate into mainstream society, but his misdeeds continue to dog his every move. If Galgut's concise prose is nearly leached of emotion, it certainly sets the scene: "There was a film of dust on everything in the car as though it had been standing there for years. He stared ahead through the windscreen. There were the corpses of beetles shattered on the glass and their legs and feelers were composed in attitudes of violent expiry." With increasingly stomach-tightening intensity, Galgut chronicles his troubled protagonist's struggles to evade capture under the ever-watchful eye of the authorities in his new town. The suspenseful narrative never strays from the dreary force of its understated character development ("He reached out with his filthy, his bloody hands and began to eat without looking at them"). As the story builds to a climax, Galgut heightens the book's emotional power with tense one-page chapters until justice—cosmic justice, in this case—comes to call.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0802141617
• ISBN 13: 9780802141613
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176