Red Dog

(Paperback)

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Description

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.

Red Dog is a brilliant, fiercely powerful novel - a wild, epic tale of Africa in a time before boundaries between cultures and peoples were fixed.

Reviews

Longlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize

The Booker judges callRed Dog'a novel of serpentine, swashbuckling sentences that capture the mounting cruelty of the colonial project.'

'Sensational... Anker writes like a talented demon' Antonia Senior, 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

'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, author of My Traitor's Heart

'Extremely wild, dramatic, original, dangerous and riveting. It is a literary experience that I will not forget.'
Sissi Reads

Author Bio

Willem Anker was born in Citrusdal in the Western Cape in 1979 and lectures in creative writing at Stellenbosch University. His first novel, Siegfried, was published in 2007. Red Dog was published in Afrikaans in 2014 and won six major literary prizes in South Africa. It is his first novel to be translated into English.