Rules of the Wild

At once a deeply romantic and fiercely lucid tale of white society in contemporary Nairobi.

Remarkable... Sensuous... Compellingly readable... Makes you feel as if you've come back from some place very far away

An intensely romantic novel... Worthy of Flaubert

An updated English Patient... Engaging... A page-turner... Intense and lyrical

Francesca Marciano was born in Rome. She worked for Italian television in New York and has written several film scripts. Since 1991 she has lived in Kenya in a house on the Indian Ocean and has made a number of documentary films in Africa. Rules of the Wild is her first novel.

In the vast space of East Africa lives a close-knit tribe of expatriates. They all meet at dinner parties; they share the same doctors and eat at the same restaurants; they sleep with each other and take the same drugs. 
 
Set in contemporary Nairobi, Rules of the Wild is at once a sharp-eyed dissection of white society in modern Kenya and the moving story of a young woman, Esme, struggling to make sense of her place in Africa, and her feelings for the two men she loves - Adam, a second generation Kenyan who is the first to show her the beauty of her adopted land, and Hunter, a British journalist sickened by its horrors. 
 
Romantic, often very funny and always compulsively readable, Rules of the Wild will be recognised as a classic novel about the white man in Africa, a book to set beside Out of Africa and White Mischief

Francesca Marciano

This second novel by the author of the acclaimed Rules of the Wild is very much in the tradition of The Leopard or The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, a compelling story of three generations in twentieth-century Italy. Casa Rossa, the home of the Strada family, is a  magnificent farmhouse standing amidst the olive groves of Puglia. The story opens as the house is being sold. Alina, the daughter entrusted with packing it up, is piecing together the fragments of her family's past. Her grandmother, Renee, a beautiful Tunisian pied noir, muse and model to Alina's painter grandfather, left him for a woman and fled to Paris. Her mother Alba, who grew up at Casa Rossa, marries a melancholic screenwriter, who dies in mysterious circumstances. And then there is her sister Isabella, once her best friend, who becomes a stranger caught up in a bitter fight for a dangerous ideology. The sisters' love for each other is always precarious, and in time shifts to a betrayal of which they can never speak. A haunting story of what happens when family secrets collide with history, Casa Rossa moves from the duplicity of Italy's role in the 1930s to the dark years of Red Brigade's terrorism in the seventies. Intricate, moving, suspenseful, Casa Rossa confirms Francesca Marciano as a writer of remarkable gifts.

Casa Rossa

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