Black Leopard, Red Wolf

Black Leopard, Red Wolf is a fantasy novel by the Jamaican writer Marlon James, published in 2019. It is the first book of the Dark Star Trilogy.

The novel is set in a landscape divided between a North Kingdom and a South Kingdom that are at war with each other, along with the city-states and tribes around them, and James builds the world from African history and mythology rather than from the European middle ages that fantasy usually borrows from. Tracker, the narrator, is a hunter who can follow a scent across great distances, and he tells the story of how he was hired to find a boy who had vanished years before. The search gathers other figures around him, including a shapeshifting companion, and the book is told as a series of accounts given under pressure, with Tracker repeatedly arguing about whose version of events is correct.

James wrote the novel after his historical novel A Brief History of Seven Killings, and it is the first of a trilogy that continues the story from other points of view.