In GREEN LION, Con is adrift, unemployed and depressed, when an old school friend is mauled by a rare lion at the breeding park where he worked. Mark is now in a coma and Con agrees to Mark’s mother’s request to collect her son’s possessions for her. And so he is drawn into a fascinating but disturbing new world.

The attacking lion has been shot and the remaining lioness, Sekhmet, the last Black-Maned Cape Lion in the world, needs a keeper. The project is losing panicked staff and Con – jolted out of his lethargy by the animal’s powerful presence, and memories of his charismatic friend – steps into the role. As he grows ever more bonded with his enigmatic charge a cult of animal lovers with obscure alchemical aims seek too claim her as their own and he finds himself seduced by one of them.

When the lioness escapes, she engulfs the city’s imagination, stirring up rumours of terror and magic. In his quest to find her, Con must enter the cordoned-off wilderness of Table Mountain, and confront dark secrets from his own past. Beautifully written, GREEN LION is a novel about loss and survival and how the last lion of its kind unleashes unexpected forces in a damaged man’s life, as myth and reality fuse.

 

Henrietta Rose-Innes is the author of the novels Shark’s Egg, The Rock Alphabet and Nineveh, and the short-story collection Homing. She was awarded the South African PEN Literary Award in 2007 and won the Caine Prize for African Writing the following year. Her novel Nineveh was shortlisted for the 2012 Sunday Times Fiction Prize and an M-Net Literary Award.

Her short stories have appeared in various international publications, including Granta, AGNI and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011, and her work has been translated into several languages. In 2015, the French translation of Nineveh won the François Sommer Literary Prize.

She divides her time between Cape Town and Norwich, where she is completing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.