How should a man react if an apparent stranger says he is a long-lost friend? This is the question that Adam Napier, the central character in Damon Galgut's powerful new novel, has to answer. Adam is a man in flight from the wreckage of his earlier life. He has lost his job and his home in the city and has retreated to a ramshackle house on the edge of a small town in the remote region of South Africa known as the Karoo. He has dreams of returning to the poetry he wrote and published 20 years earlier, but the words evade his attempts to pin them down on paper.

Haunted by “the oddness of his fate”, he is sinking into apathy and despair when a man in the town approaches him and addresses him by a nickname that he has not heard in a quarter of a century. The man, Canning, is overcome with emotion. “I've been waiting for this moment,” he says. “I knew it would come sooner or later.” Not only does Canning claim to be an old school friend, he hints at some profound, life-changing conversation that the two of them once had.

Adam's difficulty is that he has no memory of Canning whatsoever. Partly out of politeness and partly out of curiosity, he decides to feign recognition of this forgotten face from the past. Canning invites him to visit his home and drives him out into the bleak wilderness that surrounds the town. Sitting in Canning's car, puzzled and perplexed, Adam has a brief vision of the countryside as it once was, millions of years ago. “He has a shivery sense of the whole landscape looking utterly different, full of sex and death in forms he can hardly imagine.” Galgut's undemonstrative prose draws little attention to this momentary insight, but it is a premonition of how the ground will shift beneath Adam's feet as a consequence of his chance encounter.

From his much-hated father, Canning has inherited a vast game lodge that takes advantage of local quirks in the landscape and the climate to provide a green oasis amid the desert. There he lives with his beautiful black wife, Baby, and, over the months to come, Adam is gradually drawn further and further into their world. From the very beginning it is clear that serpents lurk in Canning's tainted paradise. As Adam and Baby embark on an ill-omened affair and Canning, with the aid of corrupt politicians and gangster-like businessmen, pursues plans to transform his inheritance into an exclusive golfing resort, the skilfully constructed narrative slowly brings them to the surface.

Galgut is a novelist who deliberately turns his back on showy pyrotechnics in his writing. His prose is pared to the bone, trimmed of anything that might draw too much attention to itself. Occasionally, in The Impostor, his plot seems to demand a greater expansiveness of language than he is prepared to lavish on it but, for the most part, the sense of complexity and irony hiding beneath apparent simplicity is ideally suited to a story that gradually unveils the contradictory realities of modern South Africa.

Christopher Hope places several of the short stories in his collection, The Garden of Bad Dreams, in his native South Africa but, in others, he seeks out settings around the world. In Malaysia, the Chinese widow of an English army officer is in thrall to the customs and rituals of a mother country, her husband's, that she has never visited. A Serbian monk battles against both man and nature as they intrude on the solitude of his monastery. The inhabitants of an unnamed country in the throes of revolution eat their way guiltily through the animals in their zoo as starvation threatens and then train themselves to forget what they have done. In the title story, an eccentric in Budapest dreams of gathering together a group of midgets and re-creating the glory days of the Hungarian Lilliputian Theatre, famous dwarf performers throughout the 1930s.

Hope's offbeat imagination creates a volume that is both engaging and unsettling, one that goes some way towards validating the assertion (in the proverb he takes as his book's epigraph) that “danger and delight grow on one stalk”.

The Impostor by Damon Galgut
Atlantic £12.99 pp250
The Garden of Bad Dreams by Christopher Hope
Atlantic £12.99 pp134

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