The Impostor

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.