**The heart-stopping (The Millions), richly layered (Brooklyn Rail),
haunting, beautiful (BuzzFeed) story of an escaped captive and the
killer hound that pursues him
Slave Old Man is a cloudburst of a novel, swift and compressed--but
every page pulses, blood-warm. . . . The prose is so electrifyingly
synesthetic that, on more than one occasion, I found myself stopping to
rub my eyes in disbelief.
--Parul Sehgal, *The New York Times
Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction,
Patrick Chamoiseau's Slave Old Man was published to accolades in
hardcover in a brilliant translation by Linda Coverdale, winning the
French-American Foundation Translation Prize and chosen as a Publishers
WeeklyBest Book of 2018.
Now in paperback, Slave Old Man is a gripping, profoundly unsettling
story of an elderly enslaved person's daring escape into the wild from a
plantation in Martinique, with his enslaver and a fearsome hound on his
heels. We follow them into a lush rain forest where nature is beyond all
human control: sinister, yet entrancing and even exhilarating, because
the old man's flight to freedom will transform them all in truly
astonishing--even otherworldly--ways, as the overwhelming physical
presence of the forest reshapes reality and time itself.
Chamoiseau's exquisitely rendered new novel is an adventure for all
time, one that fearlessly portrays the demonic cruelties of the slave
trade and its human costs in vivid, sometimes hallucinatory prose.
Offering a loving and mischievous tribute to the Creole culture of early
nineteenth-century Martinique, this novel takes us on a unique and
moving journey into the heart of Caribbean history.
