Who Killed Piet Barol?

A haunting, wildly imagined novel by the acclaimed author of History of a Pleasure Seeker ("the best new work of fiction ... in many moons; a classic" —The Washington Post); set in the first decades of twentieth-century colonial Cape Town and in a spirit-filled forest of secrets and magic powers. It is 1914. Germany has just declared war on France. Piet Barol, the handsome, irresistible figure of Mason's much-admired, sensuous History of a Pleasure Seeker, is once again at the center of this ambitious, lush new novel. Barol, a European adventurer living as a poseur in South Africa's Cape Colony, navigates the turbulence and opportunities of this strange land in his blind quest for comfort and riches as thousands of black families have been turned out of their homes by a white government bent on confiscating 90% of the country for the exclusive use of Europeans. Piet and his wife have successfully, grandly lived a life for the past five...