A Book of the Year - The Times
A Book of the Year - Observer
A Book of the Year - Mail on Sunday
Avoiding the chaos of the First World War, Piet Barol leaves the bustle of civilization and heads into Africa's greatest forest. With a business to build and secrets to escape, his only weapons are courage and intuition. His African guides have their own reasons for taking him to their ancestral lands. What he finds there changes him forever, and unleashes a chain of events he can neither predict nor control...
This "gorgeous treat of a novel" (The Times, Book of the Month) is a funny, sexy, irreverent, and intensely moving portrait of what unites human beings when their sacred mysteries are blown apart.
Read MoreUtterly entrancing... Richard Mason has created an epic narrative where human failure and decency are opposing forces in this riveting tale...written by a master of prose who knows effortlessly how to make the reader turn pages fast ...as a seemingly playful lie spirals into an explosion of greed, lust and ruthless ambition - Mail on SundayA triumph of a novel...powerfully evocative and wholly absorbing. Human passions, the lust for power and status, and the inevitable fallibilities of man and beast are drawn with exquisite detail - CNN LondonA stunning tour de force that will leave you gripped, moved and inspired. A richly atmospheric historical novel that says much about the way we live now, Who Killed Piet Barol? is a book to read again and again: a compelling story written in luminous prose with vividly-realised characters. This is a book by a serious writer at the height of his powers - Alex Preston, author of This Bleeding CityThis is a gorgeous treat of a novel, full of contradictions and subtleties - THE TIMESHugely accomplished . . . One of the best books of the year - INDEPENDENT on THE HISTORY OF A PLEASURE SEEKER