Ancestral, the new novel by Charlie Human, is out now from Penguin Random House SA!

Ancestral is Human’s third book, after the critically acclaimed urban fantasy novels Apocalypse Now Now (which has been made into an awesome short film) and Kill Baxter.

Human describes Ancestral as ‘a literary work dedicated to the important questions of our time. Like “Who would win in a fight between a Boerboel and a giant insectile monster?”‘

Read his hilarious description of the book on Facebook:

About the book

Clementine Khoza is a hard person; hard to know, hard to love, hard to fight. When she was a little girl, her grandfather put a stick and a shield in her hands and taught her the ancient stick-fighting art of her Zulu ancestors. The hard way.

And right now she is in a hard place, searching for Drew, her young son – kidnapped and drawn into the heart of a vicious gang conflict. Ex-army and ex-cop, Clementine has tracked Drew’s phone to Welcome Shade – a sprawling retirement estate that has fallen into disrepair to become a gang-infested war-zone. With nothing but a talent for violence, a drone piloted by a skinny Afrikaans street kid as her eye-in-the-sky, and a huge dog with PTSD who tried to kill her and then, somehow, became her sidekick, she’ll wield stick and shield, machete and shotgun, and wade through a sea of bodies to find her son.

But the gangs are only part of the problem. Dark, twisted things stalk the estate: nightmare creatures, elite military snipers working as mercenaries and a sword-wielding man on a white horse who has made her and Drew part of his agenda. And then there are the memories and visions of her ancestors, and her own very special hallucination whom she nicknames ‘Glitch’.

It’s going to be a hard day.

Categories Fiction South Africa

Tags Ancestral Charlie Human New books New releases Penguin Random House SA Speculative Fiction