He was ten years old when his family's wagons crossed the Orange River into the wilderness, and eleven when he stood in the gun-smoke at Vegkop. At twenty he cut off his own thumb at a kitchen table. At seventy-five he left his country for the last time on a Dutch warship, and at seventy-eight he died in exile above a Swiss lake ? still dictating, still praying, still President in the eyes of the people who buried him at Pretoria on the Day of the Vow.

The Shape of the Country is the life of Paul Kruger told whole: hunter, veldkornet, kommandant, and President of the South African Republic. It is the story of a frontier boy who grew up with a rifle and a Statenbijbel and became the immovable centre of his nation's forty-year struggle against the greatest empire on earth ? and the story of the households of women, servants and children on whose labour and endurance that struggle stood.

Drawing on Kruger's own memoirs and the full historical record, this is a novel of fathers and sons, of two marriages, of gold and war and exile ? the first book of the Stamvaders Novels, a series telling the history of southern Africa through the lives of the men and women who made it.

For readers of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and the frontier novels of Cormac McCarthy..