Black Leopard, Red Wolf (The Dark Star Trilogy #1)

'Black Leopard, Red Wolf is the kind of novel I never realized I was missing until I read it. A dangerous, hallucinatory, ancient Africa, which becomes a fantasy world as well-realized as anything Tolkien made, with language as powerful as Angela Carter's. I cannot wait for the next installment' Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods In this stunning follow-up to his Man Booker-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James draws on myth, fantasy and history to imagine a wholly new world, in which a legendary Tracker is hired to find a missing child... Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: "He has a nose," people say -- as well as the eye of a wolf. Engaged to find a mysterious boy who has disappeared three years before, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a rag-tag group that comes together to search for the boy. Full of striking characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard, a witch and the giant-sized Ogo, this unlikely band follow the lost boy's scent from one ancient city to another; into dense forests and across deep rivers, set upon by creatures intent on destroying them. 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 questions of all: Who is telling the truth, and who is lying? Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written a novel unlike anything that's come before it: a saga of breath-taking adventure that's also an ambitious and involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is both surprising and profound as it explores the fundamentals of truth, the limits of power, and our need to understand them both. Black Leopard, Red Wolf is the first novel in Marlon James's Dark Star Trilogy.