The man who brought the world the Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings is going hard into fantasy. In 2015, Marlon James said that he planned to “geek the fuck outâ€Â on a series that would serve as an “African Game of Thrones.†Now, it seems that James’s work has started to come to fruition. James’s The Dark Star Trilogy, published by Penguin Random House’s Riverhead Books, will play out across three installments: Black Leopard, Red Wolf; Moon Witch, Night Devil; and then The Boy and the Dark Star. The official description reads:
Three characters — the Tracker, the Moon Witch, and the Boy — are locked in a dungeon in the castle of a dying king, awaiting torture and trial for the death of a child. They were three of eight mercenaries who had been hired to find the child; the search, expected to take two months, took nine years. In the end, five of the eight mercenaries, as well as the child, were dead.
What happened? Where did their stories begin? And how did each story end? These are the questions Marlon James poses in the Dark Star Trilogy, three novels set amid African legend and his own fertile imagination – an African Game of Thrones. From royal intrigue to thrilling and dangerous voyages, and complete with pirates, queens, witches, shape-shifters and monsters, these novels are part fantasy, part myth and part detective story – all from the author of the Man Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings.
Really, you had us at “Moon Witch,†and then again at “shape-shifters and monsters,†and then again at “pirates.†Give us this trilogy now!