Borrowing from ancient lore and building upon common, human fears, this is a lush, imaginative fantasy set in an Africa inhabited by witches, monsters, were-animals, shape-changers, and other strange magic, such as a wolf Tracker whose nose leads him to others whom he seeks. He and a continuously changing group of occasional friends and former enemies search for a missing boy and find themselves in the middle of a political power struggle. No answers are clear, paths are murky, and motivations are hidden. Though fast-paced in adventure and dialog, the tale itself unfolds slowly as the listener is led through a labyrinth of stories within stories within stories. Reader Dion Graham's rich performance brings to life the multilayered characters, expertly conveying the wit and compassion as well as the anger and cynicism expressed by the large cast. Occasionally some of his characters sound enough alike that listeners may become lost in determining who is speaking. Frequent scenes of explicit physical and sexual violence reinforce recurring themes of brutality, misogyny, and power but may also repulse some listeners. Verdict This challenging book rewards listeners willing to commit time and mental energy to contemplating the meaning of truth, the consequences of decisions, and the depths of pain. Unfortunately, the many maps and lists of characters that appear in the print and ebooks are not available here. ["An unglorified if gloriously delivered story that feels eminently real despite the hobgoblins": LJ 2/19 starred review of the Riverhead hc.]-Lisa Youngblood, Harker Heights P.L., TX © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booker winner James (A Brief History of Seven Killings) kicks off a planned trilogy with a trek across a fantastical Africa that is equal parts stimulating and enervating. Centering on the search for a lost boy, the plot is relatively straightforward, though the narrator, Tracker, moves his story obliquely "as crabs do, from one side to the next." Tracker is a "hunter of lost folk," an ornery loner with an extraordinary nose that lets him pick up the scent of his quarry from miles away. Along with several other mercenary hunters, he is hired by a slave trader to find a kidnapped boy, though who the boy is and why he is so valuable are mysteries to Tracker. Storytelling is a kind of currency in this world, as people measure themselves not only by their violent feats but also by their skill in recounting them, and they have plenty of material: giants, necromancers, witches, shape-shifters, warring tribes, and unspeakable atrocities. Indeed, there is a narrative glut, which barely lets readers acclimate to a new, wondrous civilization or grotesque creation before another is introduced. It's altogether overwhelming, but on the periphery of the novel are intriguing ideas about the performance of masculinity, cultural relativism, kinship and the slipperiness of truth. Though marred by its lack of subtlety, this is nonetheless a work of prodigious imagination capable of entrancing readers. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

The first installment in the Dark Star trilogy has been touted as an African Game of Thrones," and, indeed, James, author of the Man Booker Prize winner A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), throws pretty much every fantasy and horror creature known into this brilliantly chaotic mash-up of genres and styles. Readers will discover mermaids, vampires, zombies, and witches, along with edge-of-your-seat chills and cheeky humor. James' tale digs its hooks in and never lets go, rather like the claws of the flesh-eating Zogbanu trolls, or the teeth of a vicious ghommid. Yet for all the fantasy and action, James never loses sight of the human story as his hero, Tracker, searches for the truth about a mysterious boy. Tracker's quest across wildlands and through cities brings him tantalizingly closer to the elegant, shape-shifting Leopard. James' world building weaves in cultural references from Sudan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Mali, Congo, Burkina Faso, and Senegal as he spins his griot's tale of love, revolutions, murder, and magic. Gender-bending romance, fantastical adventure, and an Afrocentric setting make for an inventive and engaging read. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The buzz is growing, thanks to James' powerful draw and the launch of a trilogy with appeal for fans of Afrofuturism and Black Panther.--Lesley Williams Copyright 2018 Booklist

the story kernel at the center of "Black Leopard, Red Wolf," Marlon James's surreal new fantasy epic, concerns the search for a missing boy. A hunter named Tracker, who is famous for his nose - "for finding what would rather stay lost" - is hired to find the lost child, who may or may not be the rightful heir to the throne of an ancient African empire. Tracker soon realizes that he is only one of many hired to find the boy - or proof of his death. The search for the boy, it turns out, is a giant MacGuffin: The very first sentence of the novel informs us that the child is dead, and James uses the search as an armature on which to hang dozens of other tales, much the way he used the story of an assassination attempt on Bob Marley in his award-winning 2014 novel "A Brief History of Seven Killings" as scaffolding to create a tangled, choral portrait of Jamaica and its relationship with the United States. In these pages, James conjures the literary equivalent of a Marvel Comics universe - filled with dizzying, magpie references to old movies and recent TV, ancient myths and classic comic books, and fused into something new and startling by his gifts for language and sheer inventiveness. The fictional Africa in "Black Leopard, Red Wolf" feels like a place mapped by Gabriel García Márquez and Hieronymus Bosch with an assist from Salvador Dali. It's a magical, sometimes beautiful place, but also a place filled with malicious vampires, demons, witches and necromancers, given to murder, cannibalism and the hurling of evil spells. The action is often gutwrenchingly violent - part "Blood Meridian," part "Deadpool," part "Game of Thrones." Innocents are slaughtered in showdowns between rival groups. Curses and dark prophecies multiply. Hearts and eyeballs are bloodily plucked out. Metamorphosis - of the sort made famous by both Ovid and Stan Lee - is one of the novel's central themes. There's Tracker's passage into manhood through a series of harrowing adventures; and his love-hate relationship with the Leopard, a charismatic being who can incarnate himself as both an animal and a man. Tracker also has a series of alarming encounters with shape-shifting creatures who may be adversaries or allies or both - including Sasabonsam, a menacing batlike creature who may have kidnapped the missing boy; and Nyka, a mercenary and former friend who once committed a terrible act of betrayal. How did these characters reach these particular crossroads? Whom can Tracker trust, and can the reader trust Tracker - or is he as unreliable a narrator as the rivals and relatives who offer conflicting story lines, suggesting that truth is "a shifting, slithering thing"? Is his father really his grandfather, as his uncle asserts? Will he avenge himself on the men who killed his brother and father? Will his love for a group of orphaned, misfit children replace the anger in his heart and give him a sense of purpose? Why does Tracker hide his real feelings about the Leopard? And why does the Leopard tell him to "learn not to need people"? Such questions are not entirely answered in this volume - which is only the first installment of what James is calling his "Dark Star" trilogy. In keeping with familiar fantasy and sci-fi templates (from Harry Potter to "The Matrix" to "The Lion King"), the plot of "Black Leopard, Red Wolf" retraces many of the steps that the scholar Joseph Campbell described as stages in the archetypal hero's journey. Like Luke Skywalker in "Star Wars" and Frodo in "The Lord of the Rings," Tracker sets off on a journey that will take him away from home - to distant lands and kingdoms, where he faces a series of dangerous tests. And like many a comic-book superhero and antihero before him, Tracker grapples painfully with his own identity, even as he fights off a succession of opponents who threaten to thwart his mission. Along the way, as his path converges with that of others looking for the missing boy, Tracker becomes part of a motley group of mercenaries and misfits who squabble noisily and violently among themselves - and who bear more than a passing resemblance to the sorts of ragtag teams of rivals assembled in movies like "The Dirty Dozen," "The Avengers" and "Guardians of the Galaxy." There are allusions in "Black Leopard, Red Wolf" not just to countless Marvel series and characters (like the Black Panther, Deadpool and Wolverine), but also to myriad literary works including Octavia E. Butler's sci-fi classic "Wild Seed," Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber," Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses," Tolkien's Middle-earth novels, Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea books, Jung's writings on archetypes and the collective unconscious and African epics about trickster and shapeshifting characters who symbolize chaos and change. James is such a nimble and fluent writer that such references never threaten to devolve into pretentious postmodern exercises. Even when he is nestling one tale within another like Russian dolls that underscore the provisional nature of storytelling (and the Rashomon-like ways in which we remember), he is giving us a gripping, action-packed narrative. What the novel could have used is a little judicious pruning: As in superhero movies, the action sometimes assumes a predictable, episodic rhythm - one violent, bravura showdown after another, strung together by interludes of travel and efforts to regroup and connect the dots. What propels the novel forward is the same thing that fuels the best superhero movies and comic books: the origin stories of its central characters. We read to find out how Tracker became the Red Wolf and how the Leopard became the Leopard. In their beginnings are their ends: the keys to their strengths and vulnerabilities, the source of their drive and ambitions and fears, and clues to the larger goals that endow their quests for self-knowledge with some larger sense of mission. With Tracker and the Leopard, James has created two compelling and iconic characters - characters who will take their place in the pantheon of memorable and fantastical superheroes. In these pages, James conjures the literary equivalent of a Marvel Comics universe. MiCHiKO KAKUTANi, former chief book critic for The New York Times, is the author of "The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump."

Wrought with blood, iron, and jolting images, this swords-and-sorcery epic set in a mythical Africa is also part detective story, part quest fable, and part inquiry into the nature of truth, belief, and destiny.Man Booker Prize winner James (A Brief History of Seven Killings, 2014 etc.) brings his obsession with legend, history, and folklore into this first volume of a projected Dark Star Trilogy. Its title characters are mercenaries, one of whom is called Leopard for his shape-shifting ability to assume the identify of a predatory jungle cat and the other called Tracker for having a sense of smell keen enough to find anything (and anybody) lost in this Byzantine, often hallucinatory Dark Ages version of the African continent. "It has been said you have a nose," Tracker is told by many, including a sybaritic slave trader who asks him and his partner to find a strange young boy who has been missing for three years. "Just as I wish him to be found," he tells them, "surely there are those who wish him to stay hidden." And this is only one of many riddles Tracker comes across, with and without Leopard, as the search takes him to many unusual and dangerous locales, including crowded metropolises, dense forests, treacherous waterways, and, at times, even the mercurial skies overhead. Leopard is besieged throughout his odyssey by vampires, witches, thieves, hyenas, trickster monkeys, and other fantastic beings. He also acquires a motley entourage of helpers, including Sadogo, a gentle giant who doesn't like being called a giant, Mossi, a witty prefect who's something of a wizard at wielding two swords at once, and even a wise buffalo, who understands and responds to human commands. The longer the search for this missing child continues, the broader its parameters. And the nature of this search is as fluid and unpredictable as the characters' moods, alliances, identities, and even sexual preferences. You can sometimes feel as lost in the dizzying machinations and tangled backstories of this exotic universe as Tracker and company. But James' sensual, beautifully rendered prose and sweeping, precisely detailed narrative cast their own transfixing spell upon the reader. He not only brings a fresh multicultural perspective to a grand fantasy subgenre, but also broadens the genre's psychological and metaphysical possibilities.If this first volume is any indication, James' trilogy could become one of the most talked-about and influential adventure epics since George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire was transformed into Game of Thrones. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.