**One of TIME’s 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time Winner of the **L.A. Times** Ray Bradbury Prize Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award ** **The **New York Times** Bestseller** **Named a Best Book of 2019 by** The Wall Street Journal, TIME, NPR, GQ, Vogue, **and** The Washington Post **Gripping, action-packed….The literary equivalent of a Marvel Comics universe. –Michiko Kakutani,** The New York Times ** ** **The epic novel from the Man Booker Prize-winning author of** A Brief History of Seven Killings **In the stunning first novel in Marlon James’s Dark Star trilogy, myth, fantasy, and history come together to explore what happens when a mercenary 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. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard. As Tracker follows the boy’s scent–from one ancient city to another; into dense forests and across deep rivers–he and the band are 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 breathtaking adventure that’s also an ambitious, 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.