Rules of the Wild: A Novel of Africa

In this mesmerizing novel, Francesca Marciano evokes the startlingly exotic world of contemporary expatriates living in Nairobi. Relief workers befriend wildlife researchers, artists exchange their intimate secrets with documentary filmmakers. They meet at dinner parties, they make love, they argue about the best way to negotiate their existence in a land they can never hope to claim. At the center of it all is the young and beautiful Esme, a free spirit in search of love and a place to call home. She thinks she has found what she is looking for in Adam, a safari leader with an almost holy appreciation of the terrain. Then she meets Hunter, a spitfire journalist outraged by the poverty and violence in which most Africans live. Combining the romanticism of Isak Dinesen with language reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway, Marciano juxtaposes the magnificent beauty of the Kenyan landscape with the human capacity for carelessness and brutality. Erotic, sensual, lush with detail and insight, Rules of the Wild evokes a land that demands catharsis and a heroine suddenly, achingly, alive. A mesmerizing novel of love and nostalgia set in the vast spaces of contemporary East Africa. Romantic, often resonantly ironic, moving and wise, Rules of the Wild transports us to a landscape of unsurpassed beauty even as it gives us a sharp-eyed portrait of a closely knit tribe of cultural outsiders: the expatriates living in Kenya today. Challenged by race, by class, and by a longing for home, here are " safari boys" and samaritans, reporters bent on their own fame, travelers who care deeply about elephants but not at all about the people of Africa. They all know each other. They meet at dinner parties, they sleep with each other, they argue about politics and the best way to negotiate their existence in a place where they don't really belong. At the center is Esme, a beautiful young woman of dazzling ironies and introspections, who tells us her story in a voice both passionate and self-deprecating. Against a paradoxical backdrop of limitless physical freedom and escalating civil unrest, Esme struggles to make sense of her own place in Africa and of her feelings for the two men there whom she loves--Adam, a second-generation Kenyan who is the first to show her the wonders of her adopted land, and Hunter, a British journalist sickened by its horrors. Rules of the Wild evokes the worlds of Isak Dinesen, Beryl Markham, and Ernest Hemingway. It explores unforgettably our infinite desire for a perfect elsewhere, for love and a place to call home. It is an astonishing literary debut.