The publishing company Narrative Landscape Press is gearing up for its release of the Nigerian edition of Marlon James’ highly anticipated new novel Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the first in his Dark Star Trilogy. Described by the author as “an African Game of Thrones,” the book has already been optioned for film adaptation by Black Panther actor Michael B. Jordan, through his production company, Outlier Society. In an email to Brittle Paper, Narrative Landscape Press editorial assistant Alice Akinwalere stated that it would be available in bookstores from 1 April.
Here is a synopsis from Narrative Landscape Press.
Black Leopard, Red Wolf, follows the story of Tracker, a hunter, who is 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 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?
Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, 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.
Black Leopard, Red Wolf has been praised by the influential critic Michiko Kakutani (“Gripping, action-packed. . . The literary equivalent of a Marvel Comics universe”) and American Gods novelist Neil Gaiman (“the kind of novel I never realized I was missing until I read it. . . a fantasy world as well-realized as anything Tolkien made, with language as powerful as Angela Carter’s”).
Born in 1970, Marlon James is the first Jamaican to win the Man Booker Prize, for his best-selling novel A Brief History of Seven Killings, which also won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Minnesota Book Award, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. He is also the author of two previous novels, John Crow’s Devil and The Book of Night Women. Black Leopard, Red Wolf is the first installment in his Dark Star Trilogy.
Pre-order Black Leopard, Red Wolf on the Narrative Landscape Press website.
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