This riveting, romantic period piece, an epic adventure, "a sweep of interesting history", spans three generations beginning at the time of The British Industrial Revolution, The Napoleonic Wars and The Dutch East India Company in 1819. It is a good new read that will stir up emotions and bring you to tears. An English widower and his courageous, beautiful daughter imbibe Lord Somerset's idea to develop a new life in a strange New World, to settle in a far off undeveloped land of darkest Southern Africa. Two young Danish men set off to explore the world. Anchored in a Bay, tied to a shaky tree trunk as a lanyard, they are smitten with the promise of wild, exciting, fecund, Africa. So much so, that when they encounter two young Afrikaners wanting to trade land for their boat, a bargain is struck. Xosa, whose father castrated him as a child to conjure youthfulness, feels he is an outcast amongst his people and thus open to joining the immigrants. He is an extraordinary, fascinating man, a specialist guide, confidant, and friend. Lion, born from this mix of differing peoples and named from the wilds from whence he came with natural inborn culture beyond the dictates of civilization. He is like the Lion cub he raises with one foot in each world. Lust, love, romance and undying devotion: Farming, ranching, diamonds and business; Politics, war, racial tensions, decimation and perseverance; This is an epic adventure which will make you laugh and make you cry, which grasps men's instinctual enjoyment of an existence in a time of hair raising fear and freedom of living. A time when there was a need to be proactive, to create and survive.
About the Author: Sheena Summerfield was born to a Danish mother and a British/South African father, somewhere on the wild coast of Africa. It was written in her mother's diary that the town was "Butterworth" in the Transkei. The mother sat up and pulled her out, delivering with the help of the kitchen maid, a sort of self delivery-the maid could hardly speak English and there was never a birth record. During the Second World War, her father went away with the Sappers engineering core and she and her siblings were placed in a German community boarding school in the countryside. For pocket money Sheena wrote all the other students compositions-10 bob a compo. 10 shillings was half a British pound in those days. The Principal was an Afrikaans gentleman. When she left school he told her she had a talent for writing and that she should consider it as a career. Instead she went into beauty and fashion and became a well-known model. Wed to an English gentleman who had settled in Africa in the 60's the couple settled in Rhodesia, now known as Zimbabwe. When her daughters were of age they were sent on a trip around the world in lieu of the usual coming of age party. They both married Americans and settled in California. Another love of Sheena's life was her garden and every day, when the garden staff went to lunch, for 2 1/2 hours she took to writing a story from her imagination-and germinated a seed of a different kind, "Where the wild lilies grow." The wonderful country of Rhodesia was smothered by a sad, cruel and wicked bush war. Despite the fact that it was the bread basket of Africa, during this bush war: guns shot through windows, AK47's, dogs poisoned, children killed, horses with hooves slashed off left bleeding to death, boy soldiers, farmers murdered, barbed wire and high walls... People fled. No doctors, no hospitals, no law and order, bank accounts emptied, and finally no food. Aids and disease rampant. Politics changed everyone's lives. Gerald, her loving husband, succumbed to cancer and what remained of the family moved to America, leaving her beloved garden and most of the family possessions behind. Sheena was packing up in the library, lying on the floor, when the little pile of black school exercise books, her lunchtime writings, hand written, caught her eye...