MOON WITCH, SPIDER KING

In 1954, JRR Tolkien’s The Two Towers set the template for the middle volume of fantasy trilogies.

- Jonathan Wright

5/5

RELEASED 3 MARCH

656 pages | Hardback/ebook/ audiobook

Author Marlon James

Publisher Hamish Hamilton

Here was the book where the best-laid plans of our heroes fail to survive contact with reality. Jeopardy rules – or at least it would if it weren’t for everyone knowing resolution waited in book three.

In contrast, the second volume of Marlon James’s Dark Star trilogy takes a radically different approach. While it introduces backstory, it tells essentially the same story as its predecessor Black Leopard, Red Wolf, but from a different perspective. Where the first volume centres on the hunt for a missing child primarily from the viewpoint of Tracker, whose key skill is as his name suggests, the new booklets 177-year-old witch Sogolon, so often at odds with Tracker, be the heroine of her own story.