In this astonishingly assured, exquisitely crafted debut collection, Anthony Doerr takes readers from the African coast to the suburbs of Ohio, from sideshow pageantry to harsh wilderness survival, charting a vast and varied emotional landscape. Like the best storytellers, Doerr explores the human condition in all its manifestations: metamorphosis, grief, fractured relationships, and slowly mending hearts. Most dazzling is Doerr's gift for conjuring...

"The Vorrh follows a brilliant cast of characters through a parallel Africa where fact, fiction, and fantasy collide. Tsungali, a native marksman conscripted by the colonial authorities--against whom he once led a revolt--is on the hunt for an English bowman named Williams. Williams has made it his mission to become the first human to traverse the Vorrh, a vast forest at the edge of the colonial city of Essenwald. The Vorrh is endless, eternal; a...

On the parched African earth more than half a million years ago sits the village of Kura, a matriarchal society of Homo erectus. Snap -- a young, passionate woman of Kura -- is destined to lead her people, and this year she must select a mate for the first time. Will she choose someone different each year, or will she find one mate she wants to pick over and over again, like her mother, Whistle, the next leader of Kura? As the Bonding ceremony approaches,...

Jesper Humlin is a poet of middling acclaim who is saddled by his underwhelming book sales, an exasperated girlfriend, a demanding mother, and a rapidly fading tan. His boy-wonder stockbroker has squandered Humlin's investments, and his editor, who says he must write a crime novel to survive, begins to pitch and promote the nonexistent book despite Humlin's emphatic refusals. Then, when he travels to Gothenburg to give a reading, he finds himself...

Gat, a 30-year-old member of the Katanga Gendarmerie, the Belgian colonial police force, is sent from the newly independent Congo to South Africa with a wallet full of blood money and instructions to "Disappear." He arrives there, bearing a secret and searching for redemption.In Cape Town he meets Petra, the 18-year-old daughter of Piet Rousseau, who heads the Bureau of State Security for the apartheid government. When Gat and Piet meet at her parent's...

It's 1909, and Teddy Roosevelt is not only hunting in Africa, he's being hunted. The safari is a time of discovery, personal and political. In Africa, Roosevelt encounters Sudanese slave traders, Belgian colonial atrocities and German preparations for war. He reconnects with a childhood sweetheart, Maggie, now a globe-trotting newspaper reporter, sent by William Randolph Hearst to chronicle the safari adventures and uncover the former president's...

"A Russian diplomat disappears while Doc is tagging great white sharks in South Africa, and members of a criminal brotherhood, Bratva, don't think it's a coincidence. They track the biologist to Dinkin's Bay Marina on the west coast of Florida, where Brotherhood mercenaries have already deployed, prepared to pillage and kill in the wake of an approaching hurricane. No one, however, is prepared for a cataclysmic event that will forever change the island...