Red Dog

Zusatztext Longlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize The Booker judges call  Red 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 Informationen zum Autor 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. Klappentext "In the eighteenth century, a giant strides the border of 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."--Provided by publisher.1 Come and see! The lizard on the rock, white ant in its beak. Its jaws start churning. It surveys its surroundings, all along the kloof. Its chomping subsides, its eyeballs roll. The colour of its head and forepaws proclaims its readiness to mate. It displays its red-brown back and ruff. It looks up, swivels its neck to the right. The blue skin of its neck strains and stretches. See, behind the crag lizard I arise from the rock. I dust my hat, light my pipe. Behold me: I am the legend Coenraad de Buys. Come, let me contaminate you, my reader of tainted stock. If you read this, you see what I see. And I see everything. I am of all time, I am immortal. Do not call me soul. I have a multitude of names. Call me rather Coenraad, or Coen if you are my mother or sister. Pen me down as De Buijs, De Buys, Buys or Buis, just as you see fit. Call me King of the Bastards, Khula, Kadisha, Moro, Diphafa or Kgowe. I am all of them. I am omnipresent. I am Omni-Buys. You will find me in many embodiments. You will come across me as itinerant farmer and anthropologist, rebel and historian. I am a vagabond, a book-bibber, a smuggler, lover and naturalist. I manifest as hunter, bigamist, orator, pillager, patriot, stone-shagger. I am a warrior and a liar; I am a scoundrel and a teller of my own tale. I am going to blind you and bewilder you with my incarnations, with my omnipotent gaze. I am a bird of passage, I am the wind beneath your wings. Stroke the small of my back and you will know I am no angel. I know you well. I know you can’t look away. May I bewhisper you further? The little hairs in your ear vibrate as my breath comes closer. Migrate with me through human memory...

Product details

• Authors: Willem Anker, Anker Willem, Michiel Heyns
• Assisted by: Michiel Heyns (Translation)
• Publisher: Pushkin Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 30.06.2020
• EAN: 9781782274230
• ISBN: 978-1-78227-423-0
• No. of pages: 432
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; FICTION / General, Africa, Fiction in translation