Religion, including the New Age aspects, is portrayed as ambitious, hypocritical, overly judgemental, power hungry and sinning. She refuses to benefit financially and makes no attempt to keep in touch. Galgut depicts a family that has no close links with each other, Amor cannot stomach her morally bankrupt and lost family, squandering their opportunities and dreams, the marital infidelities, the humiliations, the drinking, and the self deceptions.

By the time the promise can be fulfilled, more than thirty years later, there are other threats to it being realised, and Lukas, Salome's son is less than grateful, viewing it as an empty gesture. As Salome is once again left out in the cold, Amor decides to move to Durban and train as a nurse, something neither Astrid or Anton understand. Amor lives in London before returning for the funeral of a father that had come under unscrupulous and ambitious religious influences. Astrid marries Dean, becoming a mother to twins, feeling herself suffocated.

Anton goes on to desert from the army, an act that comes to be seen as heroic under President Nelson Mandela, undergoing difficult years of being destitute and in debt. The story jumps from character to character, inhabiting their thoughts and actions, at times like a stream of consciousness, Manie's bitterness at not being able to be buried next to Rachel, his estrangement from an Anton plagued by his killing of a black mother.

This promise is additionally an echo of the promise of the birth of the 'rainbow' nation, the truth and reconciliation commission, that has come to lie in tatters amidst the greed, corruption, warped ambitions and violence. In a narrative that revolves around 4 funerals, beginning with that of Rachel, who had reverted back to Judaism, that is taking place amidst the turbulence of the racist apartheid regime's state of emergency, the family, Manie, the father, the troubled son, Anton, and Astrid, the older sister of Amor, fail to fulfil the promise. The moral heart of the story, Amor Swart, overhears her dying mother, Rachel, cared for and nursed by her black maid, Salome, extract a promise from her father that Salome will be given her home. Damon Galgut's examines the disintegration of the dysfunctional privileged white Swart family in South Africa, living on a farm outside Pretoria, over a period of over 3 decades.

Synopsis of the promise damon galgut