The Promise charts the decline of the white South African Swart family, at their farm outside Pretoria, over four decades. The novel covers the funerals of four out of five of the core family, against a backdrop of a changing South Africa, from the later years of Apartheid through the optimism of the Mandela years, Zuma-era corruption and into almost the present day.

Disgrace is told from the perspective of David Lurie, a divorced literature professor at a university in post-Apartheid Cape Town. The first half of the novel details Lurie’s life as an aging academic and Byron obsessive, satisfying himself with weekly visits to prostitutes. He loses everything following his pursuit and eventual rape of a young female student, and subsequent refusal to co-operate with an enquiry that seems designed to protect him.

Michael K, a poor man with a cleft lip, quits his job as a gardener in Cape Town to honour his sick mother’s wishes to return her to the countryside of her childhood, in Prince Albert. In a fictionalized South Africa which is descending into civil war, Michael is unable to leave freely by ordinary means due to a (shall we say, kafkaesque?) bureaucracy that is purposefully paradoxical and impossible to defeat, so sets off on an impossibly long journey, carrying his mother through heavily guarded streets and freezing nights on a shoddily improvised rickshaw.

A dense, occasionally impressionistic and highly symbolic look at the life of a wealthy industrialist, Mehring, who buys a farm in Apartheid-era South Africa as a tax write-off. He's the "Conservationist" of the title, telling himself that he's conserving nature via his lifestyle choice while actually conserving the foundations of Apartheid.