Schulman, Audrey

This novel interweaves the perspectives of Jeremy, an engineer who leaves small-town Maine in 1899 to oversee the construction of a railroad across East Africa, and finds himself the reluctant hunter of two lions killing his men in nightly attacks; and Max, an American ethnobotanist who travels to Rwanda in 2000 in search of an obscure vine that could become a lifesaving pharmaceutical, but finds herself shadowing a family of gorillas whose survival is threatened by a violent rebel group from nearby Congo.

Beryl, a nature photographer, joins an expedition to photograph polar bears in Manitoba; when things go disastrously wrong, she and three others must make their way past starving bears and cross frozen tundra and treacherous ice floes to reach the safety of the town of Churchill.