Press & trade
Book One: The Forging of the Veldtsman, by Grant A. Poulton. Everything needed to review, feature, stock or book the author, on one page. Images may be used freely in coverage of the book.
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The book
About the book
A boy on the Winterberg survives a leopard mauling and carries its signature down his body for the rest of his life. By the time the farm is ash, the scar has company, and the man who wears it has one eye left, and a country to cross.
Between those two mornings: a forge in the Winterberg, the trekbokke crossing the Karoo, the gold at De Kaap, the Kimberley diamond fields, a false name carried the length of the country, and a woman out of the Welsh Marches who reads a horse before she reads the man riding it.
It is a novel about land: who works it, who is buried in it, and who holds the pen that says whose it is. It is the first book of four that follow one family across South Africa from the 1820 Settlers into the twentieth century.
About the author
Short bio (54 words)
Grant A. Poulton grew up in George, in the Southern Cape, and descends from the 1820 Settlers and the Cape Dutch. The Leopard’s Bloody Veil, a four-book series that follows one family across the South African frontier, grew from family histories handed down by word of mouth. He lives in Cape Town.
Long bio
Grant A. Poulton grew up in George, in the Southern Cape, in a rural childhood spent outdoors. A school history teacher gave him the ambition that became his fiction: to describe South Africa to a stranger who had never smelled it, never felt the heat come off the ground, never heard the silence of the veld.
His father’s line runs back to John Poulton, a shoemaker from Wendover who landed at Algoa Bay in April 1820 and was settled at Salem Hills on the Eastern Cape frontier. Both his grandmothers were Cape Dutch, so both sides of his novels are, somewhere back, his own. Much of what he writes began as stories told by uncles, aunts and grandparents.
The Forging of the Veldtsman is Book One of The Leopard’s Bloody Veil. Book Two, War and the Wire, is in progress. He lives in Cape Town and publishes under his own imprint, Wardenclyffe Press.
Readers
“I started your book this morning and was immediately transported into the veld.”Cheryl · ★★★★★ on Goodreads
“The writing is so vivid that I could picture every scene as if I were standing right there.”Lynn Munch · ★★★★★ on Goodreads
Contact
Media, reviews, events and book clubs
Grant A. Poulton · grant@grantapoulton.com · WhatsApp
Review copies (print or PDF) available on request.
Trade orders
Bluesky Distribution, Frere Street Studios, 12 Frere Street, Woodstock, Cape Town 7915
021 551 4240 · grant@grantapoulton.com
Where readers can buy it
Signed copies direct from the author at grantapoulton.com, Clarke’s Bookshop and Exclusive Books in Cape Town, Amazon, Takealot and Makro.
