DAMON GALGUT'S THE Good Doctor introduced British readers to a powerful new voice. The story of Frank Eloff, counting his personal demons and discovering the legacy of the apartheid regime during a posting in the former South African homelands, provided a graphic image of the country attempting to come to terms with its past.

Atlantic Books has now reissued one of Galgut's earlier novels, The Quarry - originally published in 1995. This is an equally uncompromising journey into the heart of South Africa's darkness, written in prose that is at once stark and striking. It lacks, however, both the psychological richness and the political