Extract: The Quarry by Damon Galgut Penguin Random House South Africa

In The Quarry, Booker Prize-winning author of The Promise, Damon Galgut brings the power of myth to his tender prose to create a devastating drama that builds to a climax almost too much to bear.

“A SILENCE FELL. The minister leaned toward him and put a hand on his arm.

'You can talk to me,' he said. 'You can tell me everything.'

'You do a lot of that, minister? Listening to people confess.'

'People tell me a lot, yes. It's part of the job.'

Without looking down, the man took the moist hand from his arm.

The minister was sweating. He emitted again that high, awful laugh and he took the bottle and drank. The hole in front of them went down into the earth and there were striations in the rock that had been made visible and the two men who were bound together by some intimate and private communion of their own that neither of them understood although each believed he did and that would kill both of them in time passed the bottle between them and took sips from it and became gradually drunker as the afternoon went by. They sat with their feet up on the dashboard. Several hours passed in this way. Then the sun had moved on and the shadows of things were stretching along the ground. In the little white car at the edge of the vast hole the two men had finished the first bottle of wine and had opened a second one and the minister was smoking a cigarette that sent lines of smoke across his face. A bird flew over the quarry and for an instant its shadow was cast in bizarre configuration across the scarified ridges of rock, monstrous and segmented and flawed.

The minister put out his cigarette. His eyes were bloodshot. In a hoarse voice, whispering, he said:

'Why don't you give up?'

The man looked at him. The minister's hand was back on his arm now and he could feel its heat.

'Give yourself up. Whatever you've done. They'll find you. In the end.'

Now the minister's hand was fumbling across his chest and was plucking at buttons and breath was roaring in his ear. The minister smelled like milk slightly off and his face was distended on some inner hunger. The man opened his door and got out. He walked to the edge of the quarry. He stood there, looking down. In his arms he carried the second bottle of wine, nearly empty. His shoulders were shaking badly. His face was bloodless and haggard. He said something inaudible. Then he raised his head and spoke aloud:

'They'll get me,' he said.

Just that. The words were simple and heavy. He looked down again. There were boulders at the bottom of the quarry and trees warped into crazed curious shapes and what appeared to be holes in the earth. He could see no clear path down and it was a wonder to him how men had ever mined this hole.

The minister got out of the car too. On bowed unsteady legs he came lurching over to where the man was standing. He enfolded him from behind in a slovenly embrace and started tugging at his buttons again.

The man pulled the fingers from his chest and prised open the arms. He turned.

'You owe me,' the minister said.

'I don't owe you.'

'I bought you food. I gave you a lift.'

'And so?'

The minister looked wildly at him, his face blurred with misery and liquor. 'All I want,' he said, 'all I want … is a little …'

He didn't finish.

'I can't help you,' the man said.”

Extracted from The Quarry by Damon Galgut, out now.