The Impostor

An “unsettling and engaging” novel about contemporary South Africa, from the Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Promise (The Telegraph).
 
Adam Napier leaves Johannesburg looking for a fresh start. Jobless and directionless, but with a head full of literary ambitions, he moves into his brother’s dilapidated house on the edge of a backwater town. One day he encounters Canning, a man who claims Adam saved his life in their school days. Adam does not remember him at all. But he plays along and, for a time, enjoys all that Canning has: a vast fortune and game preserve inherited from his father, and a beautiful, mysterious younger wife to whom Adam is compulsively, dangerously drawn.
 
“An antipastoral, post-apartheid noir” (Publishers Weekly) by “a worthy heir to Gordimer and Coetzee”, The Imposter evokes a glittering world of the moneyed old guard, newly empowered black Africans, and the betrayal and obsessions hiding in the shadows of the new South African dream (The Guardian, UK).