One of the Best Books of the Year: Newsday, The Times, The Observer, Mail on Sunday

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. Avoiding the trauma of the First World War, Piet Barol heads into Africa's greatest forest. With a business to build and secrets to escape, he's running out of time to make his own luck. His African guides have reasons of their own for taking him to their ancestral lands - where he finds a prize beyond his wildest imaginings.

To get it, he must use every weapon at his disposal. As the story moves to its devastating conclusion, every character becomes a suspect, and Piet's gamble sets him on a collision course with forces he cannot control. An exquisite, deeply human tale of temptation and theft, set against the extraordinary backdrop of history in the making, Who Killed Piet Barol? affirms Richard Mason's place among the great writers of our time.

Richard Mason is the author of The Drowning People (winner of Italy's Grinzane Cavour prize for Best First Novel), Us, Natural Elements, and History of a Pleasure Seeker. He's been long-listed for the IMPAC Dublin Library Award, and short-listed for the Sunday Times Literary Award and a Lambda Literary Award. Mason has written for European editions of Vanity Fair; American, British, and Italian Vogue; the London Times, The Guardian, the Evening Standard, Tatler, and The New York Times.

To write this book, Mason founded Project Lulutho, a center for green farming in South Africa's rural Eastern Cape, and spent a year living under canvas--learning the language and culture of the Xhosa people.

Search Who Killed Piet Barol? on YouTube to watch the story of the creation of this novel.

www.richardmason.org