Arctic Summer

FROM THE BOOKER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE PROMISE



Shortlisted for the 2015 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction

Shortlisted for the 2015 Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize

Shortlisted for the 2015 University of Johannesburg English Literary Award

Nominated for the 2014 Folio Prize

In 1912, the SS Birmingham approaches India. On board is Morgan Forster, novelist and man of letters, who is embarking on a journey of discovery. As Morgan stands on deck, the promise of a strange new future begins to take shape before his eyes. The seeds of a story start to gather at the corner of his mind: a sense of impending menace, lust in close confines, under a hot, empty sky. It will be another twelve years, and a second time spent in India, before A Passage to India, E. M. Forster's great work of literature, is published. During these years, Morgan will come to a profound understanding of himself as a man, and of the infinite subtleties and complexity of human nature, bringing these great insights to bear in his remarkable novel.

At once a fictional exploration of the life and times of one of Britain's finest novelists, his struggle to find a way of living and being, and a stunningly vivid evocation of the mysterious alchemy of the creative process, Arctic Summer is a literary masterpiece, by one of the finest writers of his generation.



Damon Galgut was born in Pretoria in 1963. He wrote his first novel,

A Sinless Season, when he was seventeen. His other books include

Small Circle of Beings,

The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs,

The Quarry,

The Good Doctor,

The Impostor and

In A Strange Room.

The Good Doctor was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Dublin/IMPAC Award,

The Impostor was also shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and

In a Strange Room was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2021

The Promise won the Booker Prize. He lives in Cape Town.



Could well be one of the finest literary works published this year... Damon Galgut, among the finest living writers, has not only given life to a quiet enigma who suffered in love but looked at the inspiration and need that helped that enigma write six major novels.



Beautifully written and utterly compelling... A vivid, moving account of the man that makes you want to read all his books again.



Galgut is extremely good on Forster's anxieties, his loneliness, his unworldliness... The portrait is beautifully nuanced, a mixture of bold, colourful strokes and delicate little flicks of the brush.



With insight and seemingly effortless fluidity, Mr Galgut has written a beautiful, and at times funny, novel that movingly captures the duality of one of Britain's most thoughtful authors.



It is a project to which Galgut, whose fiction has often covered the terrain of love, race and politics, seems perfectly suited as a writer... A remarkable, lyrical tribute.



Galgut has so seamlessly incorporated Forster's diaries, letters and novels into his narrative that it is often hard to tell which novelist is which.



A masterly piece of fiction. Delicate and detailed.



A beautifully imagined piece, getting deep inside the mind of a major English novelist.



Galgut's gifts - of phrasing, of structure, of perception - are on faultless form in these pages...

Arctic Summer is a masterpiece.



How apt that

Arctic Summer, a chronicle of a writer's longest journey to complete his masterpiece, also happens to be Galgut's finest book to date.



Preoccupied by varieties of sadness - but is so crisply written, with a deceptive simplicity and directness, that it feels full of affirmations



His [E M Forster's] plight is beautifully captured by Damon Galgut in this plangent novel, rich in period detail... Forster springs four-square from the page.



With insight and seemingly effortless fluidity, Damon Galgut has written a beautiful and funny book that movingly captures the duality of E.M. Forster, one of Britain's most thoughtful novelists.