In 1939, as Hitler cast his enormous, cruel shadow across the world, hatred of a similar kind took root in South Africa, where the seeds of apartheid were newly sown. There a boy called Peekay was born. He spoke the wrong language—English, the language spoken by those who had sent the Afrikaners to the world’s first concentration camps during the Boer War. He was suckled by a woman of the wrong of the wrong color—black, the color of fear and disdain. His childhood was marked by humiliation and abandonment. Yet he vowed to survive—he would become welter-weight champion of the world, he would dream heroic dreams.

But his dreams were nothing compared to what awaited him. For he embarked on an epic journey through a land of tribal superstition and modern prejudice, where he would learn the power of words, the power to transform lives, and the mystical power that would sustain him even when it appeared that villainy would rule the world: The Power of One.