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.

Who should we believe? Tracker? Sogolon? Both? Neither? You choose. Each is an unreliable narrator and that’s rather the point. For what it’s worth, when speaking with