The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are designed to enhance your group's experience of reading Francesca Marciano's Rules of the Wild. We hope they will give you many new ways of approaching this romantic and beautiful story in the tradition of Out of Africa and West with the Night.

Rules of the Wild tells the dramatic tale of Esmé, a young Italian woman torn between two cultures and two lovers. After the death of her beloved father, feeling estranged from her own roots in the hyper-civilized society of Naples, Esmé flees to Africa. She is soon seduced by the land's vast emptiness and healing beauty, and decides on a whim to make her home there. Before long she is caught up in the strange world of expatriates in Kenya, living side-by-side with, yet oddly separate from, their African neighbors. Her vision of her adopted continent undergoes a series of changes as she begins to see it through the eyes of the two men in her life: Adam, the gentle safari leader, born in the wild and thoroughly at home there; and Hunter, the bitter and cynical war correspondent who, as witness to the genocidal warfare of Rwanda, has acquired an entirely different perception of Africa. As time goes on Esmé learns, with pain and joy, to understand herself, her heart, and the powerful love that has drawn her to Kenya and keeps her there.