It begins with a journey. In a resurrected bungalow on the edge of the fledgling nation of Zimbabwe, Sergeant Gordon’s story has come to rest. He has borne it across drought-blasted floodplains and highlands, fleeing the copper mine which was his prison for many years. We learn his extraordinary story in reverse, from the military, to adolescent rebellion, a patchwork education and the brutal initiations of youth; back to childhood, birth and beyond. We travel the scarred landscapes of Southern Africa: a fractured region contending with its own history and a terrible present reality just as Gordon must do the same; uncovering the secrets of his own ancestry.
The Raw Man is a unique and powerful novel, a mixing of reality and myth and histories real and imagined. It is a story which has never before been told, a conjuring of an extraordinary place and time which reverberates beyond the pages. The Raw Man is a revelatory work of fiction, and one that is impossible to forget.
