The Quarry

Damon Galgut stepped prominently onto the international stage with the publication of The Good Doctor. He has been compared to J.M. Coetzee, Graham Greene, and Joseph Conrad, but his voice is truly his own. The Quarry, written ten years ago but never before published outside South Africa, is a stark, intense, and crystalline novel in which human nature is set 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 congregation in an isolated village and the passenger is a nameless fugitive from justice. When the minister realizes this, and confronts his passenger as they are overlooking an empty quarry, the fugitive kills him and assumes his vestments and identity, only todiscover that one of his first duties as the new minister is to bury the body of his victim. Despite hints that two local petty criminals may be responsible, the local police chief is watching the new minister, and as the two play a tense game of cat and mouse,culminating in a desperate pursuit across the veldt, Damon Galgut gives us a spare, devastating combat for man’s most prized attribute: freedom.