The Good Doctor - Softcover

Galgut, Damon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1843542021 ISBN 13: 9781843542025

Publisher: Atlantic Books, 2004

Synopsis

Spine creased and leaning, page edges tanned. Shipped from the U.K. All orders received before 3pm sent that weekday.

About this title

From the Back Cover

"Galgut's prose, its gentle rhythms and straightforward sentences edging toward revelation, is utterly seductive and suspenseful.... Galgut is a master of psychological tension.... Tragic and brilliant...."
Globe and Mail

"Damon Galgut has written a lovely, lethal, disturbing novel."
- The Guardian (U.K.)

"Exquisite.... It is a testament to Galgut's skill that this mostly quiet novel can leave such a lasting sense of urgency. And shame. That, after all, is what great fiction is meant to do."
- Denver Post

"Possesses the economy and pace of Hemingway and the lyrical grace of Graham Greene...."
- Booklist

"A truly remarkable novel, steeped in contemporary history, yet at the same time transcending it. I was enthralled by its intensity and the immediacy of every small twist and turn of the story."
- André Brink

"A tremendous brave book. The author never flinches, and makes his hero's dark logic compelling and hair-rising. . . . Galgut writes like a man on a long fast night drive through bad places.... It's brilliant."
- Dermot Healy

"From the first page the reader is gripped by a rare twinning of convictions: that it is strange and new, and that the imaginative rendering is of the highest quality.... There are traces of J. M. Coetzee and Graham Greene but Damon Galgut is a true original."
- Geoff Dyer

"If there is a posterity, The Good Doctor will be seen as one of the great literary triumphs of South Africa's transition, a novel that is in every way the equal of J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace.... [Galgut is] a novelist of great and growing power."
- Rian Malan


From the Hardcover edition.

From the Inside Flap

When Laurence Waters arrives at his rural hospital posting in a former homeland of the new South Africa, Frank, a fellow doctor there, is instantly suspicious. Laurence is everything Frank is not - young, optimistic, and full of new schemes. The two become uneasy friends, while the rest of the meagre staff in the deserted hospital view Laurence with a mixture of awe and mistrust.
The tired, ghostly town beyond the hospital is also coping with new arrivals, and the return of old faces. The Brigadier, a self-fashioned dictator from apartheid days, is rumoured to be still alive. And down at Mama's Place, the town's only watering hole, a group of soldiers have moved in with their malign commandant, a man Frank has met before and is keen to avoid for his own dark reasons. Laurence wants to help - but in a world where the past is demanding restitution from the present, his ill-starred idealism cannot last.

About this edition

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1843542021
• ISBN 13: 9781843542025
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 215