There are few books that quietly rearrange the way one sees a landscape. Fading Footprints is one of them.

The book Fading Footprints: In Search of South Africa's First People begins with a death notice from 1913 - a woman called Meitjie Streep, described as "Bushman", dying of "senile decay" in Kenhardt - and ends with the discovery that her people, thought long vanished, have been speaking all along in the accents and rhythms of the Karoo.

José Manuel de Prada-Samper's book is both detective story and love letter: a pursuit of voices erased from history and a celebration of their persistence in the words, stories and silences of South Africa's interior.

At its heart lies a simple but extraordinary idea: that the "lost world" of the |xam, the hunter-gatherers who once called the Upper Karoo home, never truly disappeared. Their stories survived - in fragments of memory, in place names, in Afrikaans folktales told by people who have long since stopped knowing who they are descended from.

De Prada-Samper, a Spanish folklorist who first stumbled upon Specimens of Bushman Folklore in a Cambridge bookshop in the 1980s, spends the rest of his life following that trail of...