The Good Doctor - Softcover

"Galgut's prose, its gentle rhythms and straightforward sentences edging toward revelation, is utterly seductive and suspenseful.... Galgut is a master of psychological tension.... Tragic and brilliant....""Globe and Mail" "Damon Galgut has written a lovely, lethal, disturbing novel."-"The Guardian" (U.K.) "Exquisite.... It is a testament to Galgut's skill that this mostly quiet novel can leave such a lasting sense of urgency. And shame. That, after all, is what great fiction is meant to do."-"Denver Post" "Possesses the economy and pace of Hemingway and the lyrical grace of Graham Greene...."-"Booklist" "A truly remarkable novel, steeped in contemporary history, yet at the same time transcending it. I was enthralled by its intensity and the immediacy of every small twist and turn of the story." -Andre Brink "A tremendous brave book. The author never flinches, and makes his hero's dark logic compelling and hair-rising. . . . Galgut writes like a man on a long fast night drive through bad places.... It's brilliant."-Dermot Healy "From the first page the reader is gripped by a rare twinning of convictions: that it is strange and new, and that the imaginative rendering is of the highest quality.... There are traces of J. M. Coetzee and Graham Greene but Damon Galgut is a true original."-Geoff Dyer "If there is a posterity, "The Good Doctor" will be seen as one of the great literary triumphs of South Africa's transition, a novel that is in every way the equal of J.M. Coetzee's "Disgrace,.".. [Galgut is] a novelist of great and growing power."-Rian Malan "From the Hardcover edition."

A powerful, taut and intense tale of a friendship overshadowed by betrayal, set against the tawdry hopes and disappointments of a post-apartheid South Africa. When Laurence Waters arrives at his new post at a deserted rural hospital, staff physician Frank Eloff is instantly suspicious. Laurence is everything Frank is not-young, optimistic, and full of big ideas. The whole town is beset with new arrivals and the return of old faces. Frank reestablishes a liaison with a woman, one that will have unexpected consequences. A self-made dictator from apartheid days is rumored to be active in cross-border smuggling, and a group of soldiers has moved in to track him, led by a man from Frank's own dark past. Laurence sees only possibilities-but in a world where the past is demanding restitution from the present, his ill-starred idealism cannot last.