GREEN LION by Henrietta Rose-Innes is published this month in South Africa by Umuzi, an imprint of Penguin Random House SA. Unsettling and moving, GREEN LION is a page-turning story of containment and freedom, power and loss, examining the borderline between human and animal, and revealing the beast that crawls under every skin, itching to escape.

GREEN LION made its first appearance at the Franschhoek Literary Festival in South Africa, where Henrietta spoke on two author panels. It will be launched this Thursday at Kalk Bay Books.

GREEN LION will be published in French translation by Edtions Zoe in 2016.

Henrietta is the author of four novels and one book of short stories. She was winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing 2008 (for which she was shortlisted in 2007), the PEN Short Story Prize 2007, and awarded the Runner-Up prize for her short story 'Sanctuary' at the BBC International Short Story Awards 2012. Her novel, NINEVEH, was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Fiction Prize (South Africa), the M-Net Prize 2012 and won the Francois Sommer Literary Prize.

She has degrees in archaeology and biology and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town and is currently completing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. For more information on Henrietta, please visit her website.

Praise for GREEN LION:

‘In GREEN LION Henrietta Rose-Innes has written another extraordinary novel, lyrical, deftly plotted, and as full of life as the Ark. In the Cape Town of her imagination, a place both utterly strange and eerily familiar, wildness is always pressing up against the fence. The ‘animal’, she suggests, is not just out there but in here, shaping what we do and say, embedded in language itself like a stubborn gene.’ – Ivan Vladislavić

‘Remarkable new novel: an eccentric, dream-like meditation … The novel’s idiosyncrasy is welcome in a place where the stories we agree to tell ourselves about “nature” are often so predictable … Her prose is minutely alert to what George Steiner called “teeming strangeness and menace” of the organic presence all around us, and the pressure that it exerts at the borders of our understanding … Pulsing behind it all is a something deeply sorrowful: a work of mourning for both the human losses within the book but also the life forms that are vanishing from the earth beyond … GREEN LION reads as a local requiem for this global story: for the vast planetary die-off that is mostly happening outside language, that is both immeasurably sad and inescapably “natural”. Rose-Innes’s work seeks out ways of honouring our animal ghosts and keeping them, in some small and symbolic measure, alive.’ – Hedley Twidle, BooksLIVE

Praise for Henrietta Rose-Innes:

'Rose-Innes is a writer almost in the Virginia Woolf mould – lateral of mind and poetic in her style of narration.' – Leon de Kock, Sunday Times

‘Henrietta Rose-Innes is a master of the beautifully thought-out metaphor. Her prose is elegant and liquid.’ – Cape Times