The Raw Man - Softcover

"Once the reader has gone past the first chapter - no, first page - his chances of putting down the book are small" (Helon Habila Guardian)

"The Raw Man is an extraordinary novel, and a work of rare conception, bringing together, within one individual, the painfully conflicted history of southern Africa" (Brian Chikwava)

"A fantastically imaginative and enjoyable book" (Think Africa Press)

"Unapologetically ambitious and suffused with a rare emotional intensity" (BookTrust)

"Clark’s novel is rich and strange... It is difficult not to admire its scope and verve, and not to be keen to know what its author does next" (Times Literary Supplement)

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.