The Quarry

Damon Galgut established himself as a writer of international caliber with the publication of The Good Doctor, which was sold in sixteen countries and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the African region. The Quarry, written ten years ago but never published outside of South Africa, is another stark, intense, and crystalline novel in which human nature betrays itself against the desolate backdrop of rural South Africa. 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 is 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.