'Much more than a portrait of a Congolese herd boy who becomes an important military man, it is a portrait of a vast and chaotic country in a state of near-anarchy. I have long admired Lieve Joris's African books, but this one is both powerful and timely, intensely imagined.' Paul Theroux

A sweeping history of the Age of Reason, which shows how, although it was a time of progress in many areas, it was also an era of brutality and intolerance, by the author of The Borgias and The Florentines.