Red Dog

Willem Anker

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Red Dog won four major South African prizes. At the end of the eighteenth century, a giant strides the Cape Colony frontier. Coenraad de Buys is a legend, a polygamist, a swindler and a big talker; a rebel who fights with Xhosa chieftains against the Boers and British; the fierce patriarch of a sprawling mixed-race family with a veritable tribe of followers; a savage enemy and a loyal ally. Like the wild dogs who are always at his heels, he roams the shifting landscape of southern Africa, hungry and spoiling for a fight. This is his story; the story of his country, and of our blood-soaked history. Red Dog is a brilliant, fiercely powerful novel-a wild, epic tale of Africa in a time before boundaries between cultures and peoples were fixed.