Black Leopard, Red Wolf
by Marlon James (Hamish Hamilton, £20)
Marlon James’s Man Booker-winning novel A Brief History of Seven Killings channelled several voices—journalists, henchmen, psychopaths, bystanders— as it took us into the dark heart of 1970s Jamaica and an assassination attempt on Bob Marley. “Dead people,” as its first line observed, “never stop talking.” Seven Killings was a savage, intense and highly unusual book, but if you were asked to predict what its author would do next, your first guess probably wouldn’t be an epic fantasy about a magical axe-wielding people-hunter called Tracker, and his buddy, a Hawkeye-like archer who can turn into a leopard.
But Black Leopard, Red Wolf is just that: a sprawling novel set in an ancient world based on African folklore, which follows a band of supernaturally augmented mercenaries (and a helpful buffalo called “The Buffalo”) as they search across kingdoms and through dimensions for a lost child. It is blood-soaked, sex-stuffed and full of flesh-ripping events. Its readers will have no trouble imagining the conversations in publishers’ offices and book fairs after James turned it in: “Hey, you know that guy who won the Booker? His next one is Black Panther meets The Lord of the Rings!”