Damon Galgut is one of South Africa's most exciting new literary voices.
In The Impostor, his first novel since The Good Doctor, Galgut leads
his readers into the developing heart of postapartheid South Africa, a
landscape being reshaped by new waves of money and power. Adam Napier
leaves Johannesburg looking for a fresh start. Jobless and
directionless, but with a head full of literary ambitions, he moves into
his brother's dilapidated house on the edge of a backwater town. One day
he encounters Canning, a man who claims Adam saved his life in their
school days, but whom Adam does not remember at all. But he plays along
and, for a time, enjoys all that Canning has: a vast fortune and game
preserve inherited from his father, and a beautiful, mysterious younger
wife to whom Adam is compulsively, dangerously drawn. A spellbinding
achievement from one of the defining members of a new generation of
African writers, The Impostor evokes a glittering world in which the
moneyed old guard, newly empowered black Africans, and shady foreign
businessmen jockey for a piece of the new South African dream.