Black Leopard, Red Wolf (Marlon James)
30 October 2019
'The child is dead. There is nothing left to know.'
Tracker is a hunter, known throughout the thirteen kingdoms as one who has a nose - and he always works alone. But he breaks his own rule when, hired to find a lost child, he finds himself part of a group of hunters all searching for the same boy. Each of these companions is stranger and more dangerous than the last, from a giant to a witch to a shape-shifting Leopard, and each has secrets of their own.
As the mismatched gang follow the boy's scent from perfumed citadels to infested rivers to the enchanted darklands and beyond, set upon at every turn by creatures intent on destroying them, Tracker starts to wonder: who really is this mysterious boy? Why do so many people want to stop him being found? And, most important of all, who is telling the truth and who is lying?
Marlon James weaves a tapestry of breathtaking adventure through a world at once ancient and startlingly modern. And, against this exhilarating backdrop of magic and violence, he explores the fundamentals of truth, the limits of power, the excesses of ambition, and our need to understand them all.
Average Rating:
Ross Hetherington (9 February 2020 14:53)
Good, but I found in kind of pointlessly violent at times (too many times).
Sean Aaron (31 October 2019 13:54)
A new voice and a new world of grounded fantasy. The dialogue and characters are a delight and the author’s use of language and adept skill at describing the settings and events makes for an enjoyable experience!
Sinclair Manson (31 October 2019 09:16)
I enjoyed reading this very much. The biggest section of the book is a superficially a traditional fantasy quest narrative, in which a group of diverse heroes set out to restore the rightful king to his throne. However, this is a novel about stories, and how we use them to explain ourselves and our actions, so nothing in it is one dimensional. Situations and characters are described in multiple ways, by themselves and others. There was some discussion over whether Tracker is an unreliable narrator. For me, this book is casting doubt on the reliability of any narrator, suggesting that there can be no objective relating of events, only storytelling. The writing itself was energetic, colourful, brutal. I thought the elements of horror, both shocking and creeping, were extremely effective, the book being full of monsters and monstrous acts.