Rules of the Wild

2 cassettes / 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 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 won place in Africa and of her feelings for the two men 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 journalists sickened by its horrors.

Rules of the Wild explores unforgettably our infinite desire for a perfect elsewhere, for love and a place to call home. It is an astonishing literary debut.