LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE At the end of the eighteenth century, a giant strides the Cape Colony frontier. Coenraad de Buys is a legend, a polygamist, a swindler and a big talker; a rebel who fights with Xhosa chieftains against the Boers and British; the fierce patriarch of a sprawling mixed-race family with a veritable tribe of followers; a savage enemy and a loyal ally. Like the wild dogs who are always at his heels, he roams the shifting landscape of southern Africa, hungry and spoiling for a fight. This is his story; the story of his country, and of our blood-soaked history.

"A novel of serpentine, swashbuckling sentences that capture the mounting cruelty of the colonial project" - International Booker Prize judges

"Sensational... Anker writes like a talented demon" - The Times, Historical Fiction Book of the Month

"One of the best antiheroes you will read this year leaps from the pages" - The Times Best Summer Books

"Ambitious... brings South Africa's bloody birth to life" - Spectator

"A powerful and stark historical novel... A twenty-first century story in the vein of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness... This staggeringly original blend of fact and fiction is savage but totally gripping" - NB Magazine

"It is the hottest piece of writing out here... a highly readable and relentless tale ... passionately nihilistic with inserts of great noir humour and even sometimes truly moving tenderness." - Marlene van Niekerk

"The Afrikaans equivalent of the postmodern cowboys-and-Indians tales of Cormac McCarthy" - Rian Malan