The Quarry

He came out of the grass at the side of the road and stood there without moving. His eyes were blinking in a way that wasn’t normal and he was rocking very gently on his heels. There were raw places on his skin. There were blisters on his feet that had come from walking and blisters in his mouth that had come from nothing, except his silence perhaps, and bristles like glass on his chin.

 

On a lonely stretch of road a nameless man commits a murder. The victim is a religious minister on his way to take up a post in a nearby town. When the murderer decides to steal the dead man’s identity, his first official duty is to bury the body, which has just been found near a disused quarry. But the head of the local police takes a close interest in the new minister’s work – watching, listening, slowly circling his prey. In The Quarry, Damon Galgut brings the power of myth to his tender prose to create a devastating drama that builds to a climax that is almost too much to bear.

 

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