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Black Leopard, Red Wolf is the kind of novel I never realized I was missing until I read it. A dangerous, hallucinatory, ancient Africa, which becomes a fantasy world as well-realized as anything Tolkien made, with language as powerful as Angela Carter's. I cannot wait for the next installment' - Neil Gaiman, author of American GodsIn this stunning follow-up to his Man Booker-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James draws on myth, fantasy and history to imagine a wholly new world, in which a legendary Tracker is hired to find a missing child...Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: 'He has a nose,' people say - as well as the eye of a wolf. Engaged to find a mysterious boy who has disappeared three years before, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a rag-tag group that comes together to search for the boy. Full of striking characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard, a witch and the giant-sized Ogo, this unlikely band follow the lost boy's scent from one ancient city to another; into dense forests and across deep rivers, set upon by creatures intent on destroying them.As he struggles to survive, Tracker starts to wonder: Who, really, is this boy? Why has he been missing for so long? Why do so many people want to keep Tracker from finding him? And perhaps the most important questions of all: Who is telling the truth, and who is lying?Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written a novel unlike anything that's come before it: a saga of breath-taking adventure that's also an ambitious and involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is both surprising and profound as it explores the fundamentals of truth, the limits of power, and our need to understand them both.

Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination,

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.

Par exemple, ce n'est pas moi qui ai acheté la trilogie de fantasy de Marlon James, mais Francis Geffard. Et la programmation avec la trilogie de Robert Jackson Bennett rique d'être un tantinet compliquée. Francis a aussi acquis les droits de la dystopie de Louise Erdrich, c'est normal il la publie depuis des années.

Merwin Tonnel a écrit :Mais sinon les droits achetés juste à la sortie d'un roman, c'est plutôt fréquent. La littérature américaine reste la plus grande pourvoyeuse de scripts et de licences du cinéma américain, donc les grosses sorties sont surveillées très en amont à Hollywood.