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Matthew Jackson

FictionHistorical Fiction

The Everlasting

Review by Matthew Jackson

Ambition is a cornerstone of great historical fiction, and even novels whose premise exceeds their author’s grasp are exciting because of the nerve it takes to simply go for it. You have to be ambitious to chart the course of a piece of known history in a compelling new way, and you have to be even more ambitious to do so across several eras of human civilization in perhaps the most storied city in the history of the world.

That’s what Katy Simpson Smith does in her latest novel, The Everlasting, and the result is a rare book whose ambition is matched by its craft and emotional weight. Combining the gravity of history with the tribulations of faith and the wit and wisdom of Satan himself, this is a book that somehow retains its power even as it hops across time to tell four very different stories that nonetheless share a common, human heart.

Smith begins in modern-day Rome with Tom, a biologist whose body and soul seem to be failing him in a tumultuous time. Then she works backward to tell three more stories in three other phases of Rome’s immortal existence. From Giulia de’ Medici and her unwanted pregnancy, to a monk named Felix and his vigil over the corpses of his brothers in the Medieval era, to the tale of the defiant young girl named Prisca in the early decades of Christianity, each story weaves its own spell. There’s no weak link here, no character you’d rather leave out of this journey, because Smith’s prose is so precise and evocative that each narrative feels as precious as a holy relic.

Then there’s the cutting, heartbroken voice of Satan interjecting into each narrative, tying them all together with his own perception of human history and his own particularly bittersweet relationship with God.

The result of all these different threads is an exquisite tapestry of history, religion and heartbreak that’s perfect for historical fiction and fabulism fans alike.

Ambition is a cornerstone of great historical fiction, and even novels whose premise exceeds their author’s grasp are exciting because of the nerve it takes to simply go for it. You have to be ambitious to chart the course of a piece of known history in a compelling new way, and you have to be […]
FictionFamily Saga

Greenwood

Review by Matthew Jackson

Charting the story of a family across generations brings with it many pitfalls that could inevitably lead to a weak link in a story’s chain. Walking a path that takes you through many voices, many times and many feelings is enough to get a great many storytellers lost. The same is true of stories with a very particular, even metaphorical sense of structure, as the scaffolding has a tendency to obscure the heart of the piece. So there’s a lot that could have fallen short with a novel like Greenwood, which does all of the above. But with the expert, deft hands of a seasoned carpenter, author Michael Christie carefully and methodically pieces together a story as intricate as the rings within a tree. The result is a deeply compelling novel of family and memory.

In the year 2038, Jacinda “Jake” Greenwood is working off her crippling student debt by working as a guide in the “cathedral” that is one of the world’s last forests. The planet surrounding the cathedral has undergone a “Great Withering,” which left the island as one of the last refuges of old-growth trees. The trees have always felt like home to Jake, but as we meet her, two things happen that make her question everything: a strange development in the trees themselves, and news about her family heritage that shakes her to her core.

From there, Christie works backward and then forward again in time, charting the history of the Greenwood family by moving toward the center of his drama and then back out again, like following the rings of a tree. This sense of formalism could prove stuffy, but Christie creates a sense of poetic, organic symmetry through rich characters and evocative, almost tactile descriptions. Even if readers are sad to leave Jake’s storyline in order to get to know her family, they may become just as captivated by her grandmother, Willow, and the ancestors that come before her.

The structure provides a captivating spine for Greenwood, but what stands out most by the end is the way in which Christie has been able to evoke and give voice to the way the cumulative effect of time and memory weighs on us all in ways both uplifting and terrifying. Greenwood is a towering, profound novel about the things that endure even as the world seems to be moving on.

With the expert, deft hands of a seasoned carpenter, author Michael Christie carefully and methodically pieces together a story as intricate as the rings within a tree, and the result is a deeply compelling novel of family and memory.
FictionGothic Fiction

Things in Jars

Review by Matthew Jackson

Fiction that transports us back to another time can, at its best, make us feel at home in an era into which we’ve never set foot. Unless, of course, the author doesn’t want us to feel at home. In the realm of great fantasy fiction set in a past we think we know, it’s often to a storyteller’s advantage to lure us in with a false sense of familiarity, only to reveal something else entirely. 

With Things in Jars, Jess Kidd has woven a spellbinding alternate version of Victorian London that is both recognizable and like getting lost in some mist-shrouded parallel world only spoken of in myths. It is into this version of London, where tattooed ghosts lurk near their own gravestones and seven-foot-tall housekeepers spend their idle time reading potboiler fiction, that Kidd drops Bridie Devine, a private detective with such distinctive style and intense charisma that we fall in love with her immediately. 

Jess Kidd’s Victorian London is both recognizable and like getting lost in some mist-shrouded parallel world only spoken of in myths.

When we meet her, Bridie is coming off a tough, failed case, but she’s got a new one on the horizon. The secret child of a wealthy man is missing, and the child may be much more than just a lost little girl. Armed with her own wits and accompanied by an unlikely spectral assistant, Bridie sets out to learn the truth about the child and along the way finds some ties to a past she tried to leave behind. 

Equal parts historical thriller and fabulist phantasm, Things in Jars is instantly compelling, but what sets it apart is the prose. There’s a playful, lithe familiarity to it as Kidd dances across delightfully apt phrases like a master. Even as the novel sweeps you up in its narrative, it also sweeps you up in its sentence-by-sentence construction, making it both a whirlwind read and a novel you could happily get lost in for weeks, dissecting every paragraph. 

Things in Jars is the kind of lavish, elegant genre treat that makes you wish Kidd would churn out a new Bridie Devine mystery every three years until the end of time. 

With Things in Jars, Jess Kidd has woven a spellbinding alternate version of Victorian London that is both recognizable and like getting lost in some mist-shrouded parallel world only spoken of in myths.

Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

The Vanished Birds

Review by Matthew Jackson

The best science fiction stories create a bridge between ambitious, precisely calculated genre concepts and the deep, emotional truths that unite us all. Keeping the balance between intricate sci-fi backdrops and delicate matters of the heart is a high-wire act that only succeeds with tremendous care, passion and narrative grace. In his debut novel, The Vanished Birds, Simon Jimenez has announced himself as a graceful, spellbinding storyteller with the gifts to pull it off.

The Vanished Birds charts, in its carefully selective way, centuries of human history and advancement, ultimately catapulting us into a future carved out of glittering corporate-run space stations and far-flung starships that zip through folds in spacetime. It’s into this future, where time is as much of a commodity as any physical good, that Jimenez drops Nia Imani, a woman whose job as captain of a time-folding ship means she’s constantly losing time. Months of travel for her mean years lost on either side of the journey, and this constant sense of detachment has left her unmoored. Then she meets a mysterious boy who fell from the sky onto a distant planet, a boy with a gift for music who could also be destined for much more. Together, they find a bond neither dreamed possible, but powerful forces also want the boy, and a struggle lies ahead.

Though Jimenez’s prose feels right at home in a universe of interstellar travel and space station settlements, The Vanished Birds soars highest when the author is navigating the complex emotional avenues through which much of this deeply human story unfolds. The book never fails to deliver the science fiction goods, and fans of high-concept leaps will be satisfied, but the book’s emotional core is what makes it fly.

The Vanished Birds strikes a breathless balance between the conceptually dazzling and the emotionally resonant, and it’s in that balance that a bright new voice in genre fiction is born.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Simon Jimenez discusses how our contemporary fear of lost time inspired The Vanished Birds.

The best science fiction stories create a bridge between ambitious, precisely calculated genre concepts and the deep, emotional truths that unite us all. Charting the balance between intricate sci-fi backdrops and delicate matters of the heart is a complex high-wire act that only succeeds with tremendous care, passion and narrative grace. In his debut novel, The Vanished Birds, Simon Jimenez has announced himself as a graceful, spellbinding storyteller with the gifts to pull it off.

FictionHistorical Fiction

The World That We Knew

Review by Matthew Jackson

Alice Hoffman is a brilliant weaver of magic and the mundane, as many of her novels have proven over the years. In her hands, a story we think we know, from a time we think we’ve extracted every possible detail, can become a soulful new voyage into the heart of the human condition. With her latest novel, The World That We Knew, Hoffman travels to a hidden world built amid the horrors of the Holocaust and brings forth a spellbinding tale of love, loss and what it means to endure. 

Hoffman’s story begins in 1941 in Berlin, where a young Jewish mother, Hanni, knows that she must find a way to smuggle her daughter, Lea, out of the city before the Nazis take notice of her. To do this, she turns to a rabbi for mystical help, only to discover that his daughter, Ettie, is more willing to help Lea through magical means. Ettie, working from knowledge she’s gained through observing her father, crafts a golem they call Ava to guide and protect Lea. Thus begins an unlikely and harrowing journey through France, where Ettie finds a new purpose, Lea finds her soul mate and Ava finds that she’s much more than a single-minded creation.

In beautifully precise prose, Hoffman chronicles the experiences of these characters and those whose lives they touch along the way. Throughout the next three years of the war, each woman tries to survive while also pursuing her own process of self-discovery. Though Nazi-occupied France is an endlessly compelling place to many readers, Hoffman never takes her historical setting for granted. Rather than leaving us to lean on what we think we know, she weaves a fully realized vision of the hidden parts of history, chronicling the stories of people who slipped through the cracks on their way to freedom and the emotional toll that freedom took. 

Page by page, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, The World That We Knew presents a breathtaking, deeply emotional odyssey through the shadows of a dimming world while never failing to convince us that there is light somewhere at the end of it all. This book feels destined to become a high point in an already stellar career.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Alice Hoffman discusses the origins and history behind The World That We Knew.

Alice Hoffman travels to a hidden world built amid the horrors of the Holocaust and brings forth a spellbinding tale of love, loss and what it means to endure.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Quichotte

Review by Matthew Jackson

Some stories are eternal, and while writers don’t necessarily repeat them word-for-word through the generations, they are capable of crafting compelling echoes that evoke both the time we’re in and the universal emotional constants of humanity. Evoking that sense of universality becomes more difficult when you’re telling a story that’s an open homage to one of the most famous and influential works of literature in human history, but in his insightful and wickedly funny way, Salman Rushdie pulls it off with Quichotte. 

A retelling of Don Quixote, Quichotte follows a man who, on a quest to win the heart of a daytime TV star, has redubbed himself “Quichotte” (pronounced “Key-shot”) and committed his life to the pure pursuit of what he calls “The Beloved.” To aid him in his quest, he imagines a son called Sancho, and the two journey together on a road trip through a half-imagined, enchanted version of the American landscape, staying in hotels where the TV is always on. 

Quichotte and Sancho’s story is woven through a metanarrative, as Rushdie reveals that their story is actually being imagined by a man who writes spy novels under the pen name Sam DuChamp. DuChamp and Quichotte’s stories are both, in their ways, tributes to Cervantes’ epic quest for love and acceptance, full of journeys to redemption and understanding in a world that seems to have gone mad around them, and it’s in this metafictional journey that Rushdie’s already witty and precise prose really comes alive. By structuring Quichotte as a narrative within a narrative, he’s given himself an inventive way to say something about a world obsessed with everything from reality television to hacktivism.

Quichotte is a story of breathtaking intellectual scope, and yet it never feels too weighty or self-serious. Like Cervantes, Rushdie is able to balance his commentary with a voice full of tragicomic fervor, which makes the novel a thrilling adventure on a sentence-by-sentence level and another triumph for Rushdie. 

Some stories are eternal, and while writers don’t necessarily repeat them word-for-word through the generations, they are capable of crafting compelling echoes that evoke both the time we’re in and the universal emotional constants of humanity. Evoking that sense of universality becomes more difficult when you’re telling a story that’s an open homage to one […]
FictionSpeculative Fiction

First Cosmic Velocity

Review by Matthew Jackson

The best alternate histories seem real, not just because they’re able to both replicate and twist historical details with precision and care, but also because they’re able to capture an emotional landscape. First Cosmic Velocity, the debut novel from Zach Powers, is full of attention to physical, geographic and historic detail, but what makes it a truly gripping work of imagination is its ability to create an emotional reality for its lead character amid an ambitious, delightfully strange look at a different version of the Soviet space program.

It’s 1964, and the space race is in full swing. The Soviet launch program in Star City continues its progress under the watchful eye of its Chief Designer, and to all outward appearances, everything seems to be a success. Within the walls of Star City, though, a different story is unfolding. The cosmonaut program has only partially succeeded. The astronauts go up, but they never come back down. Instead, the Chief Designer and his team have relied on twins to create an elaborate ruse, as the surviving twin carries the burden of continuing the life of their deceased sibling after a “successful” space mission. First Cosmic Velocity follows the last of these twins, Leonid, as he embarks on a publicity tour even as the space program and its closely guarded secrets are at a crossroads.

Perhaps the greatest success of the novel is Powers’ ability to get inside Leonid’s head, to paint a portrait of the psychological whiplash he’s endured throughout his life. The novel jumps back and forth between Leonid’s childhood as a poor boy in Ukraine and his adulthood as a person whose entire existence is built on lies. What does that do to a person? What choices can they make when they’ve surrendered their very autonomy to a cause? Powers is unafraid to probe the confounding, often darkly comic answers to these questions, even if the answers are sometimes frustratingly uncertain.

This attention to emotional detail, combined with a powerful supporting cast and a masterful sense of historical table-setting, makes First Cosmic Velocity a delightfully complex page-turner for space enthusiasts and fans of alternate histories. You will never look at the space race the same way again.

Zach Powers is unafraid to probe confounding, often darkly comic questions, even if the answers are sometimes frustratingly uncertain.
Science Fiction & FantasyFictionScience Fiction

Wanderers

Review by Matthew Jackson

It’s not easy to write the end of the world. In precise and deliberate prose, you can explain why and how your fictional world is ending, but writing something that really conjures the end—with the many cogs in the machine of civilization that have to break down, and the consequences of the failure of each one—is much harder, particularly if you’d like to do it with heart and thrills and something resembling a thesis statement about the human condition. Very few authors can pull it off, and even fewer can master it. With Wanderers, Chuck Wendig has mastered it. 

The story begins with a young girl walking out of her house one morning with no shoes or supplies. Her sister tries to stop her, then her father, then EMTs and police, but still she walks. She is the beginning of an apparent epidemic of “sleepwalkers” that form a flock who walk—expressionlessly and painlessly—across the United States. In the midst of this mysterious outbreak come a series of characters—a disgraced CDC official, a woman who built the world’s most sophisticated artificial intelligence, a rock star, a preacher on the verge of crisis and the young girl’s older sister—who all have roles to play in unraveling the mystery of what’s to come. The walkers, you see, are just the beginning, and what follows is an American epic with the soul of the nation—and the world—at stake. 

Wendig tells this story through several points of view, mixing not just different geographic and emotional perspectives but also different spiritual, political and psychological worldviews, each one as real as the last, each gripping in its way. His ability to juggle so many fully realized characters is impressive, but even more so is the astonishing power Wanderers commands in conveying what it would actually feel like if this happened in the America we live in now, complicated by deep ideological divides, disinformation and the constant chatter of social media. All of these elements work together, often in surprising ways, to create a sense of terrifying plausibility and compelling verisimilitude.

The true success of Wanderers, though, is not just in its ability to show us the grim scenarios that could play out across a divided nation; it’s in its heart. Whether he’s writing about rage or faith or the faintest glimmer of light, Wendig brings a sincerity and emotional weight to his prose. That’s why the scariest parts of Wanderers work, but it’s also why the most hopeful ones do, too.

The story begins with a young girl walking out of her house one morning with no shoes or supplies. Her sister tries to stop her, then her father, then EMTs and police, but still she walks. She is the beginning of an apparent epidemic of “sleepwalkers” that form a flock who walk—expressionlessly and painlessly—across the United States. In the midst of this mysterious outbreak come a series of characters—a disgraced CDC official, a woman who built the world’s most sophisticated artificial intelligence, a rock star, a preacher on the verge of crisis and the young girl’s older sister—who all have roles to play in unraveling the mystery of what’s to come. The walkers, you see, are just the beginning, and what follows is an American epic with the soul of the nation—and the world—at stake. 

FictionFamily DramaComic Fiction

Mostly Dead Things

Review by Matthew Jackson

Grief takes many forms, and those many forms have been translated into many great novels of astonishing tonal variety. Some are entirely somber, others gloriously comedic, all speaking to an essential truth about the profound and often bizarre ways in which we mourn. With Mostly Dead Things, Kristen Arnett has crafted an astonishing debut novel that’s both a new entry in the long history of great fiction about grief and a darkly comic flight of brilliance that transports the reader to a familiar yet alien world of frozen moments and dysfunctional love.

Jessa-Lynn Morton has taken over her family’s Florida taxidermy shop in the wake of her father’s suicide, and things are not going well. Her sister-in-law (who also happened to be the love of her life) has walked out on the family, her brother is having trouble focusing on anything, clients are drying up, and their mother is using the taxidermied animals in the shop window to make increasingly bizarre works of “art.” Torn between family obligation, a new romantic relationship and her mother’s efforts to both transform and defile her father’s work, Jessa struggles to find her place in a changing family dynamic.

Arnett shifts between past and present throughout the novel, reframing Jessa’s formative experiences as a budding taxidermist and as a young gay woman, just as Jessa must reframe her own life in a new context after her father’s death. It’s a powerful narrative tool, particularly as the novel increasingly focuses on taxidermy as a way to capture moments frozen in perfect, intricate preservation. Arnett’s precise, wickedly witty prose paints a portrait of a searcher, of a woman longing for what came before even if she’s no longer entirely sure what she liked about it, even as she attempts to let something new into her life. It all comes together in a bold, dark and profound comic novel about the nature of love, loss and invention.

Mostly Dead Things. announces Arnett as one of the most promising rising novelists writing today.

With Mostly Dead Things, Kristen Arnett has crafted an astonishing debut novel that’s both a new entry in the long history of great fiction about grief and a darkly comic flight of brilliance.
FictionSpeculative FictionShort Stories

Exhalation

Review by Matthew Jackson

Reading a Ted Chiang anthology is an experience that slowly claims little corners of your brain until eventually your whole head is devoted to it. You read and digest one story, but each tale is so compelling and complex that no matter how long you wait, that first story will continue to beg questions even as you try to digest a second. One after another, Chiang’s stories claim their place in your mind until you’re completely swept up in his provocative and at times even charming world. 

Exhalation, Chiang’s latest collection of stories covering almost 20 years of his work, gathers nine tales that ponder questions of the nature of consciousness, the rigidity of history, our relationship with the machines that increasingly take control of our lives and more. In the title story, the narrator uses their own artificial lungs as the basis for a study on the nature of reality. In “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” Chiang explores time travel as it might have existed in a time before science fiction pushed it into the public consciousness. “The Great Silence,” one of the book’s shortest tales, explores the intellect and mortality of a parrot. Then there’s the collection’s centerpiece, the novella-length “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” which explores the growth and developing lives of a group of digital organisms and the humans who care for them. 

Each story is a carefully considered, finely honed machine designed to entertain, but this collection also forces you to look at things like your smartphone or your pet with new eyes. What makes Exhalation particularly brilliant is that not one of the stories feels like it’s designed to be thought-provoking in a stilted, academic way. Chiang is an entertaining, empathetic writer first, before being one of contemporary sci-fi’s intellectual powerhouses, and each story reads that way. 

Exhalation is a must-read for any fan of exquisitely crafted sci-fi. Chiang has reminded us once again that he’s one of the most exciting voices in his field, and that we shouldn’t expect him to wane any time soon.

Ted Chiang’s latest collection of stories covering almost 20 years of his work, gathers nine tales that ponder questions of the nature of consciousness, the rigidity of history, our relationship with the machines that increasingly take control of our lives and more.

FictionSpeculative Fiction

The Parade

Review by Matthew Jackson

Some novels are masterpieces of world building and detail, with page after luxurious page of topography and wardrobe. Sometimes, the world can be so elaborate that it overtakes the story and any questions that story might ask. A great storyteller knows what to tell us and what to leave out, and a great novelist knows when the book should be short.

The Parade, the latest compelling tale from Dave Eggers, is a short book, but not at the expense of anything it needs to function as a taut, direct and lean narrative. There’s not an ounce of fat on this book, and that makes it both inviting and the kind of novel that will linger in your brain for hours, even days, after you’ve read it.

Eggers sets his tale in a nameless country just coming out of a painful civil war. Two men, who refer to themselves by numbers rather than names to simplify their relationship, have been hired to pave a road that serves as both a symbolic and literal unifier of the country. It’s a simple job, largely automated thanks to sophisticated machinery, but the two men approach it very differently. One is businesslike, Spartan and committed to keeping to his schedule without any complications, while the other is carefree and eager to take in the culture. As the road project marches along and their journey becomes complicated by their conflicting personalities, the novel asks us to ponder the dueling ideas of isolation and immersion in a foreign land, and how much is too much of either.

The novel is sparse, free of proper names and major geographic and political details because it doesn’t need them. In deliberate, measured prose, Eggers marches his characters down the road toward uncertainty, building tension and conflict until the novel’s complex and thoughtful climax. The purposeful vagueness makes the novel feel timeless and universal, while Eggers’ way of pouring on the emotional details when it really counts makes it haunting.

The Parade is a tight, thrilling, brisk read that will make you ponder your place in the world.

The Parade, the latest compelling tale from Dave Eggers, is a short book, but not at the expense of anything it needs to function as a taut, direct and lean narrative. There’s not an ounce of fat on this book, and that makes it both inviting and the kind of novel that will linger in your brain for hours, even days, after you’ve read it.

Science Fiction & FantasyFictionFantasy

The Bird King

Review by Matthew Jackson

With her debut novel, Alif the Unseen, G. Willow Wilson announced herself as a powerful new voice in the realm of speculative fiction. With her new novel, The Bird King, she has cemented her place as one of the brightest lights of fantasy storytelling.

Granada, the last Muslim emirate in Spain, is nearing the end of its existence, as the Spanish crown rises and the Inquisition comes with it. In this turbulent time, Wilson introduces us to Fatima, a concubine to the sultan, and her cherished friend Hassan, a mapmaker with a strange gift. Hassan can draw maps of places he’s never seen, and sometimes even alters the landscape around him to carve new paths. When a representative of the Spanish government visits and brands Hassan a sorcerer and sinner, Fatima feels compelled to save her friend, and the pair flees the relative comfort of court for the unknown. Guided by a resourceful and witty jinn, the pair ventures out into the world, buoyed by little more than faith and a story they’ve told to each other about a mythic bird king.

Wilson’s tale unfolds with all the grace and swiftness of a classic magical adventure, with strange encounters and new lands waiting with each turn of the page. There’s a familiarity, a lived-in quality, to the prose and sense of character that evokes an almost fairy-tale sensibility, but then Wilson digs deeper, into something as timeless as a myth but much more intimate. As it spreads out before the reader like a lavish tapestry, Wilson’s story becomes a gorgeous, ambitious meditation on faith, platonic love, magic and even storytelling itself, with a trio of unforgettable personalities serving as its beating, endlessly vital heart.

The Bird King is a triumph—immersive in historical detail and yet, in many ways, it could have happened yesterday. Wilson has once again proven that she’s one of the best fantasy writers working today, with a book that’s just waiting for readers to get happily lost in its pages. 

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with G. Willow Wilson for The Bird King.

Granada, the last Muslim emirate in Spain, is nearing the end of its existence. In this turbulent time, Wilson introduces us to Fatima, a concubine to the sultan, and her cherished friend Hassan, a mapmaker with a strange gift.

Science Fiction & FantasyFictionFantasy

Black Leopard, Red Wolf

Review by Matthew Jackson

BookPage starred review, February 2019

A novel that truly defies all efforts of categorization is a rare thing. When his Dark Star Trilogy was announced, Marlon James’ new genre endeavor was dubbed a kind of “African Game of Thrones,” an epic saga that merged history and fantasy into something new. The first volume in the trilogy—Black Leopard, Red Wolf—has arrived, and even that rather enticing description doesn’t do it justice. James has once again delivered something that must be read to be believed, a majestic novel full of unforgettable characters, gorgeous prose and vivid adventures.

Tracker, James’ narrator, is a man without a true name, a man who seems to walk in the margins of society after a difficult childhood turned him into a loner. Still, he is renowned for his “nose,” the ability to search for and find lost things with uncanny skill, and so he is called into service to search for a vanished boy. To find the boy, he must also attempt a rare collaboration, teaming up with a strange band of characters, among them a shapeshifter known as Leopard. As the hunt begins and Tracker tells his tale, he must explore not only the significance of the boy he’s searching for but also the nature of truth itself. 

Tracker’s voice—rendered in visceral, evocative prose—is immediately seductive, from his colorful use of profanity to the way he describes not just what happens to him but also how the perception of it all can shift in a moment. It’s the kind of voice that can carry you anywhere, and James puts it to good use, propelling the reader forward into an African fantasy landscape that rivals the greatest sword-and-sorcery storytellers in the history of the genre. The ambition is familiar, but the places James takes us are not, and that’s an irresistible combination.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf heralds the arrival of one of fantasy’s next great sagas and reaffirms James as one of the greatest storytellers of his generation.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Tracker, James’ narrator, is a man without a true name, a man who seems to walk in the margins of society after a difficult childhood turned him into a loner. Still, he is renowned for his “nose,” the ability to search for and find lost things with uncanny skill, and so he is called into service to search for a vanished boy.

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