In 2004, Anton is in a loveless marriage with his childhood sweetheart, Desirée, and heavily in debt, while Astrid is married to her second husband and Amor is working as a nurse in an HIV ward in Durban, where she lives with her long-term girlfriend.

Secretly, Astrid has been having an affair with her husband's business partner, and after being denied penance by her priest during confession, is murdered in a hijacking.

In 2018, Anton has sunk into alcoholism and deep depression due to his failed marriage, impotence, trauma over the killing of a civilian in the army, and the feeling that he has wasted his life.

However, a recent land claim on the plot by a family that was forcibly removed during the apartheid era means that Salome might lose her ownership shortly after acquiring it.

[7] Galgut's modernist style and narration have been compared to the tradition of William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.

[11][12] Jon Day wrote that "as members of the family find reasons to deny or defer Salome's inheritance, the moral promise – the potential, or expectation – of the next generation of South Africans, and of the nation itself, is shown to be just as compromised as that of their parents.

"[10] Although Galgut himself denied that it was consciously based on the book,[13] many critics also picked up on the novel's narrative and thematic similarities with (and parallels to) E. M. Forster's Howards End.

[20] In a rave review for Harper's Magazine, Claire Messud called Galgut an "extraordinary" novelist, writing, "Like other remarkable novels, it is uniquely itself, and greater than the sum of its parts.

"[9] In Literary Review, David Isaacs emphasizes Galgut's skilful positioning of his characters, which "allows for a combination of caricature and depth: the Swart family are at once totemic and singular.