In a Strange Room

Damon Galgut's masterful novel of longing and thwarted desire following one man on three very different journeys.



A young man takes three journeys, through Greece, India and Africa. He travels with little purpose, letting the chance encounters of the road dictate his path. But although he knows that he is drifting, he is unable to settle. It is as if, without these encounters, the person he is cannot exist. And yet each journey ends in disaster.



A novel of longing and thwarted desire, rage and compassion, In a Strange Room is an extraordinary evocation of one man's search for love, and a place to call home.



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.



Beautiful. Strikingly conceived and hauntingly written.



Superb... With this new book Galgut has struck out in a new direction and taken his writing to a whole other level. It is a quite astonishing work



Acute, beautiful, unsettling. I have rarely felt so moved whilst reading.



Galgut, ever the wanderer, always the seeker, is here at his most deliberate; as intent on finding meaning as on asking questions.



A powerful three-part meditation on the relationship between travel, love and an off-kilter self.



Haunting... Devastating... This is a wise and brilliant book.



One of the most beautiful and unsettling books I've ever read. I can't remember a more troubling and intense study of rootlessness and loneliness; Galgut is a writer of great, almost frightening, depth.