The Old Slave and the Mastiff
Society of Authors Scott Moncrieff Prize for Translations from French, 2020
A profoundly unsettling story of a plantation slave’s desperate escape into a rainforest beyond human control, with his master and a ferocious dog on his heels.
This flight to freedom takes them on a journey that will transform them all, as the overwhelming physical presence of the forest and its dense primeval wilderness reshapes reality and time itself.
In the darkness, the old man grapples with the spirits of all those who have gone before him; the knowledge that the past is always with us, and the injustice that can cry out from beyond the grave.
From a Prix Goncourt writer hailed by Milan Kundera as the ‘heir of Joyce and Kafka’, The Old Slave and the Mastiff fearlessly portrays the demonic cruelties of the slave trade and its human costs - a wise, loving tribute to the Creole culture of Martinique, and a vividly told journey into the heart of Caribbean history and human endurance.
This flight to freedom takes them on a journey that will transform them all, as the overwhelming physical presence of the forest and its dense primeval wilderness reshapes reality and time itself.
In the darkness, the old man grapples with the spirits of all those who have gone before him; the knowledge that the past is always with us, and the injustice that can cry out from beyond the grave.
From a Prix Goncourt writer hailed by Milan Kundera as the ‘heir of Joyce and Kafka’, The Old Slave and the Mastiff fearlessly portrays the demonic cruelties of the slave trade and its human costs - a wise, loving tribute to the Creole culture of Martinique, and a vividly told journey into the heart of Caribbean history and human endurance.
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