Beautiful... moving... immensely rich. Neil Bennun's tale has a noble, even Homeric, resonance... Told with wonderful finesse. -- The Telegraph

Beautifully told -- Sunday Times

Rich and beautiful -- The Spectator

The |Xam/ka !ei were a hunting and gathering people from what is today the arid Northern Cape region of South Africa. Their language and culture did not survive contact with European settlers. What remains to us, beyond stone artefacts and rock art on the dolerite boulders of the flat land south of the Orange River, is largely contained in a remarkable archive of some 10,000 pages of myth, ritual and history of notebook pages recorded by two eccentric linguists at the end of the 19th century.