Drawing on the legends and traditions of the African continent, as well as his own rich imagination, Marlon James, author of the Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, crafts a breathtaking epic narrative in the tradition of J. R. R. Tolkien, Angela Carter, and Gene Wolfe.
Marlon James was born in Jamaica in 1970.
His first novel, John Crow’s Devil (2005), received critical recognition and was nominated for several awards. His second novel, The Book of Night Women (2009), won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award, and was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Marlon James’s third novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), won the 2015 Man Booker Prize, the American Book Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction. It was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and included in more than twenty “best books of the year” lists.
His later work, Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2020), uniquely blends African myths and legends with fantasy and forms the first part of a trilogy continued by Moon Witch, Spider King and The Boy and the Dark Star.
His literary and non-literary writings have appeared in magazines such as Esquire and Granta. He teaches English and Creative Writing at Macalester College in Minnesota, USA.
Tracker, a hunter renowned throughout the Thirteen Kingdoms for his extraordinary sense of smell, is able to find anything lost or missing using this unique ability — and he always works alone. The only exception comes when he is hired to find a missing child.
Joined by a strange band of hunters — from a giant to a witch and a leopard who can transform into a man — he follows the boy’s scent through enchanted and shadowy lands, across dangerous lakes, rivers, and forests, facing countless obstacles along the way, until he begins to wonder: who is this mysterious boy, really? Why are so many people trying to prevent him from finding him? Where does truth end and lies begin?
Against a backdrop of magic and unspeakable violence, Marlon James constructs his own Game of Thrones, exploring fundamental truths about strength and power, ambition, instinct and reason, good and evil.