When Mountford, an epileptic subject to seizures and memory loss, awakened near a bloody corpse, he was forced to escape to avoid execution for the crime. The years passed, nothing was heard of Mountford, and it was supposed he had either died or fled the country. A decade later, Sibyl, now Lady Penrith, is travelling along a desolate moor when a crazed man stops her carriage and hands her a scrawled note. Believing the note to be from Mountford, Sibyl sets out to investigate, and with the help of her niece Coralie Urquhart she will uncover the long-hidden truth behind the murder and the horrible fate of Brandon Mountford!Thou Art the Man (1894) is a thrilling and fast-paced novel of murder and mystery. It is also, as Laurence Talairach-Vielmas discusses in her introduction to this edition, a fascinating look at the ways Braddon adapted late-Victorian theories of heredity, disease, and criminology into her fiction. This edition reprints the unabridged text of the 1895 "yellowback" edition, complete with a facsimile of its cover, and includes a new introduction and explanatory notes.

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    Together with an army of fellow Zulus, Untuswa flees the harsh rule of the Zulu king, Shaka, to establish a new nation under a new leader, Umzilikazi.Untuswa quickly earns the King's favour and is appointed his chief messenger; emboldened by this honour, he asks the King's permission to marry. Laughing, the King promises to give Untuswa not only permission to marry, but also his assegai--his spear, which in his hand is symbol of his authority--but only if Untuswa performs a deed braver and bolder than any he has heard of. Untuswa, determined to claim performance of this promise, fights ferociously against enemy tribes, confronts the terrifying magic of the witch-doctors, and risks death at the hands of cannibals in the mountains. But these dangers are nothing compared to the fate that awaits him when he does the unthinkable--elope with the King's intended bride.The first of Bertram Mitford's tetralogy of historical Zulu novels, "The King's Assegai" is remarkable for being a novel written by a white man, but peopled entirely by African characters. Based on Mitford's own experiences in South Africa and local oral tradition, *The King's Assegai* is not simply a great British novel about Africa, but, as Gerald Monsman argues in his introduction, a great African novel. Long out of print and neglected, "The King's Assegai" deserves a place alongside H. Rider Haggard's "Nada the Lily" as precursor to later established African classics such as Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart."