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After the success of The Good Doctor, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2003, readers eagerly awaiting Damon Galgut’s latest novel won’t be disappointed. The Impostor is a thrilling and at times uncomfortable read dealing with the growing pains of post-apartheid South Africa.

The protagonist, Adam Napier, is sacked from his job and replaced by a young black intern, whereupon he leaves Cape Town for a small rural town in the Karoo. He tries to set up a new life for himself in an abandoned house owned by his wealthier brother. Adam lives alone, attempting, and failing, to write poetry, until he bumps into an old school-friend, Canning, and is drawn into a world of corruption and crime.

A sense of unease pervades the novel. Canning tells Adam that he is his most “loyal friend,” and that he and his wife Baby are “the people who matter most to me in the world” – yet Adam cannot remember having met them before. He begins to spend weekends at Canning’s lavish estate, and soon he’s having an affair with the beautiful and enigmatic Baby. He also becomes embroiled in Canning’s plans to turn the estate into a golf course, which involves bribing the town’s mayor and other local politicians.

Some predictable plotting aside, Galgut has written a novel that manages to address a question crucial to contemporary South African life: who has been lying to whom? With its bleak landscapes and troubled characters, The Impostor sensitively adumbrates the difficulties faced by the ‘new’ South Africa. John Sunyer