Olive the Lionheart: Lost Love, Imperial Spies, and One Woman's Journey into the Heart of Africa

Olive the Lionheart: Lost Love, Imperial Spies, and One Woman's Journey into the Heart of Africa

by Brad Ricca
Olive the Lionheart: Lost Love, Imperial Spies, and One Woman's Journey into the Heart of Africa

Olive the Lionheart: Lost Love, Imperial Spies, and One Woman's Journey into the Heart of Africa

by Brad Ricca

Hardcover

$29.99 
  • SHIP THIS ITEM
    Temporarily Out of Stock Online
  • PICK UP IN STORE
    Check Availability at Nearby Stores

Related collections and offers


Overview

"Brad Ricca’s Olive MacLeod is my favorite sort of woman from history—bold and unconventional, utterly unsinkable—and her story is so full of adventure and acts of courage, it’s hard to believe she actually lived. And yet she did! Brad Ricca has found a heroine for the ages, and written her tale with a winning combination of accuracy and imagination." — Paula McLain, author of Love and Ruin and The Paris Wife

From the Edgar-nominated author of the bestselling Mrs. Sherlock Holmes comes the true story of a woman's quest to Africa in the 1900s to find her missing fiancé, and the adventure that ensues.

In 1910, Olive MacLeod, a thirty-year-old, redheaded Scottish aristocrat, received word that her fiancé, the famous naturalist Boyd Alexander, was missing in Africa.

So she went to find him.

Olive the Lionheart is the thrilling true story of her astonishing journey. In jungles, swamps, cities, and deserts, Olive and her two companions, the Talbots, come face-to-face with cobras and crocodiles, wise native chiefs, a murderous leopard cult, a haunted forest, and even two adorable lion cubs that she adopts as her own. Making her way in a pair of ill-fitting boots, Olive awakens to the many forces around her, from shadowy colonial powers to an invisible Islamic warlord who may hold the key to Boyd’s disappearance. As these secrets begin to unravel, all of Olive’s assumptions prove wrong and she is forced to confront the darkest, most shocking secret of all: why she really came to Africa in the first place.

Drawing on Olive’s own letters and secret diaries, Olive the Lionheart is a love story that defies all boundaries, set against the backdrop of a beautiful, unconquerable Africa.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781250207012
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date: 08/11/2020
Pages: 400
Product dimensions: 6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

About The Author

BRAD RICCA is the author of the Edgar Award-nominated Mrs. Sherlock Holmes and Super Boys, winner of the Ohioana Book Award for Nonfiction. He won the St. Lawrence Book Award for American Mastodon. Ricca lives and works in Cleveland.

Table of Contents

Dear Reader xvii

Prologue xix

1 The Fairy Flag 1

2 The Parry Girl and the Naturalist 7

3 Leviathan 23

4 The Arrival 33

5 The Protectorate 40

6 A Correspondence, Part 1 54

7 On the Hunt 63

8 The Great Lamido 79

9 Devil in the Forest 90

10 A Correspondence, Part 2 100

11 Into the Swamp 110

12 The Two Lakes 119

13 The Man-Leopard 131

14 A Correspondence, Part 3 142

15 A Painting on a Wall 154

16 Fort Lamy 168

17 A Correspondence, Part 4 176

18 The Wanderer 189

19 The Great Gauaronga, Part 1 204

20 The Great Gauaronga, Part 2 223

21 The French Report 232

22 Valkyrie 243

23 The Lake of Loneliness 251

24 The Pilgrim to the Stone 265

25 The Road 272

26 Decisions in Fika 278

27 Poisoned Arrow 294

28 Mr. Charles Temple 301

29 The Fate of Olive MacLeod 308

30 The Lighthouse 325

Epilogue: The Last King of Dar Fur 335

Notes 343

Bibliography 361

Acknowledgments 363

Author's Note 367

Resources 369

Index 371

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews