In a Strange Room

By Damon Galgut,

Book cover of In a Strange Room

Book description

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2010 MAN BOOKER PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2010 ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE ONDAATJE PRIZE

A young man takes three journeys, through Greece, India and Africa. He travels lightly, simply. To those who travel with him and those whom he meets on the way - including a handsome,…

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Why read it?

1 author picked In a Strange Room as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Damon Galgut recently won the Booker Prize for his riveting, satirical The Promise, but, much as I admire that novel, Galgut’s earlier (also Booker-nominated) semi-autobiographical novel, In a Strange Room, remains my favourite. It comprises three long short stories, all centred on a character called Damon, alerting us to the autobiographical element of the stories. And yet Galgut resists the total identification of autobiography, partly by his device of switching disconcertingly between first and third-person narration (sometimes ‘Damon,’ sometimes ‘I’), and present and past tenses. But the novel is more than technical trickery: the shifting perspectives allow us…

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Neuroscience PhD student Frankie Conner has finally gotten her life together—she’s determined to discover the cause of her depression and find a cure for herself and everyone like her. But the first day of her program, she meets a group of talking animals who have an urgent message they refuse…

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