Rules of the Wild

After the death of her father, a noted Italian poet, Esmeralda flees the rigidity of European society to seek a new life in a white expatriate community of East Africa, where she finds herself torn between two very different men. A first novel. Simultaneous.

/ 3 hours
Read by Penelope Ann Miller
"The voice of [the] narrator . . . seduces the reader into the world of this intelligent first novel."
--Publishers Weekly

A mesmerizing work that evokes the worlds if Isak Dinesen, Beryl Markham, and Ernest Hemingway.  A 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 o