Black Leopard Red Wolf by Marlon James (The Dark Star Trilogy)

440 pages

The epic new novel from Marlon James, the Man Booker Prize-winning author of A Brief History of Seven Killings: an African Game of Thrones.

In the first novel in Marlon James' Dark Star trilogy, African myth, fantasy and history come together in the story of a band of mercenaries hired to find a missing child.

Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: "He has a nose," people say. Engaged by a mysterious slave trader to track down a boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to find the boy. The band is a hodge-podge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard.

As Tracker follows the boy's scent--from one ancient city to the next, through dense forests and across deep rivers--the band is set upon by creatures intent on destroying Tracker and his cohorts. As he struggles to survive, Tracker starts to wonder: Who, really, is this boy? Why has he been missing for so long? Why do so many people want to keep Tracker from finding him? And perhaps the most important question of all: who is telling the truth and who is lying?

Combining African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written an immersive saga of breathtaking adventure that's novel. Black Leopard, Red Wolf is both an addictive page-turner and a genre-defying epic. Bold, ambitious and captivating, it's a literary event that's great fun to read.

REVIEWS

Stand aside, Beowulf. There's a new epic hero slashing his way into our hearts, and we may never get all the blood off our hands. . . . [This] spectacular volume of a planned trilogy, rises up from the mists of time, glistening like viscera. James has spun an African fantasy as vibrant, complex and haunting as any Western mythology, and nobody who survives reading this book will ever forget it. That thunder you hear is the jealous rage of Olympian gods." —The Washington Post

"Black Leopard, Red Wolf defies comparison. This is sui generis, the type of loving and self-loathing fever dream of a story that our grandparents would never tell in mixed company. If there's any comparison to be made, it's this: Black Leopard, Red Wolf is one of the most compelling fantasy lores since Frodo Baggins set out from the Shire." —The Globe and Mail

"Far more daring and audacious than George R.R. Martin's magnum opus, far more complex and rich. . . Black Leopard, Red Wolf is a fervent fever dream of a book. . . . If one allows themselves to be immersed in James's world and words, they will emerge profoundly stirred, their understanding of the world, of the power of a novel, of the nature of reading itself, fundamentally changed." —Toronto Star