Historical fiction inspired by the story of groundbreaking paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey, FOLLOW ME TO AFRICA is a sweeping, dual-timeline story of intergenerational friendship, a meditation on the beauty of the natural world, and a celebration of the women who pave the way for those to come.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Penny Haw’s Follow Me To Africa, which is out February 25th 2025.
It’s 1983 and seventeen-year-old Grace Clark has just lost her mother when she begrudgingly accompanies her estranged father to an archeological dig at Olduvai Gorge on the Serengeti plains of Tanzania. Here, seventy-year-old Mary Leakey enlists Grace to sort and pack her fifty years of work and memories.
Their interaction reminds Mary how she pursued her ambitions of becoming an archeologist in the 1930s by sneaking into lectures and working on excavations. When well-known paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey commissions her to illustrate a book, she’s not at all expecting to fall in love with the older married man. Mary then follows Louis to East Africa, where she falls in love for a second time, this time with the Olduvai Gorge, where her work defines her as a great scientist and allows her to step out of Louis’s shadow.
In time, Mary and Grace learn they are more alike than they thought, which eventually leads them to the secret that connects them. They also discover a mutual deep love for animals, and when Lisa, an injured cheetah, appears at camp, Mary and Grace work together to save her. On the morning Grace is due to leave, the girl—and the cheetah—are nowhere to be found, and it becomes a race against time to rescue Grace before the African bush claims her.
From the acclaimed author of The Invincible Miss Cust and The Woman at Wheel comes an adventurous, dual timeline tale that explores the consequences of our choices, wisdom that comes with retrospection, and relationships that make us who we are, based on the extraordinary real life of Mary Leakey.
1983
Olduvai Gorge, United Republic of Tanzania, East Africa
The only thing worse than being somewhere you don’t want to be is discovering no one else wants you there either, thought Grace as she followed the narrow, sandy path out of the camp.
“We can’t have a teenager just hanging around. This is a dig, not a discotheque. She’ll have to do something.”
Grace had overheard the words on her way to breakfast, recognizing the sharp-edged, plummy voice of Dr. Mary Leakey. She wasn’t surprised. Dr. Leakey had eyed her over the rim of her whiskey tumbler with overt displeasure when they were introduced the previous evening. Still, it stung, being unwelcome.
George—an upshot of recent years was that Grace thought of her father as “George” rather than “Dad”—had told her not to wander into the bush alone. It was dangerous, he’d said. But that was when they’d arrived in the dark yesterday. Now, the next morning, though it was apparently winter and not yet eight o’clock, the sun was in full bloom in an immense, cloudless sky. Even the shadows seemed cowed by the intensity of the light. That, and the scrubby, squat vegetation, made it unlikely that she’d trip over a lion or rear-end an elephant.
She scrambled up a sandy mound and scanned the view. It was nothing like the African savanna she’d imagined when the plane left Heathrow and she’d yielded to the fact that she couldn’t avoid the trip. Where were the swaying grasslands crowded with herds of wildebeests, zebras, gazelles, and giraffes? Where were the branches decorated with the dangling tails and limbs of leopards and the rocky lairs from which lions might contemplate their culinary desires? Why couldn’t she see the vast spans of water she’d admired on wildlife documentaries, the promised lakes strewn with flocks of big-billed pelicans and pink flamingos?
Olduvai Gorge wasn’t a savanna at all, she thought. It was as bleak as a desert, weathered and dry, with smatterings of stiff, spiky bushes and trees. The earth was crusty and bleached. It was a wonder anything grew there at all. To Grace’s right, a monolith with a messy green flattop rose like the remnant turret of a giant sandcastle. Or it might’ve been a craggy mound of ice cream. Vanilla at the bottom, followed by a layer of chocolate with fuzzy green peppermint on top. Except ice cream was smooth and cold. Here, everything was dehydrated, scorched, and ragged.
Her father had tried to warn her how barren the place might seem to her, particularly since it was the dry season. Much had happened since the lake and its fertile shoreline and all the creatures that existed there two million years ago had disappeared. Tier upon tier of sand, soil, stones, volcanic rocks, and other deposits—each separated by hundreds of thousands of years—had accumulated over the ages, shifting when volcanoes erupted and the earth fractured, and were eroded by water and wind. Nowadays, the gorge was rich with fossils, some as old as two million years, he’d enthused. Fossils. Ancient bones. Stone tools. Leftovers. Archaic litter. The remains of the dead and extinct. Not people he’d known who’d died recently, but creatures who’d been alive thousands upon thousands of years previously. Like they mattered more. Indeed, they did to some. That, her father had told her, was why Dr. Leakey called Olduvai Gorge home. That’s why he was there. Why he’d insisted Grace accompany him was still unclear to her.
Grace felt the familiar sense of something knotting in her stomach. The grief was back, binding itself into a ball too big to contain. It hadn’t stayed in England. Perhaps if she screamed loudly enough, she could expel it across the gorge and into the endless African expanse.
She looked at the sandy track etched into the earth across the ravine. It wound up and over the sandy valley like a faded ribbon, disappearing into a huddle of low, dense trees before reemerging on the crest of the hill on the other side. Was that the road they’d driven to the camp after the interminably long journey from Nairobi the day before? She turned to look around. It had to be. There were no other tracks to be seen. The hills behind were higher. Those in the distance, rugged and blue, could’ve been mountains. It’s possible, she thought, that a savanna lay between her and the farthest range. She couldn’t be sure from her vantage point. Maybe that’s where the animals were. Would they hear her scream?
“Here you are!”
George struggled toward her, his narrow face pink and shiny beneath a wide-brimmed khaki hat. Grace wondered if she loathed him more now that he’d forced his way back into her life than she did when she’d accepted years previously that her mother was right: he had discarded them.
“You shouldn’t go off on your own,” he said, puffing as he approached. “It really isn’t safe.”
She shrugged, looking around pointedly.
He took off his hat, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped his face. “Just because you don’t see anything doesn’t mean there aren’t any animals around. Please, my girl, you have to stay in the camp.”
Grace was silent.
Her father cleared his throat. “Dr. Leakey wants to see you.”
“What for?” she asked. “To explain that we’re on a dig, not at a disco?”
He stared at her, opening his mouth as if to speak. When he couldn’t find the words, he looked at his feet and sighed instead. Somewhere in the distance, a raven gave several short, deep croaks.
“She wants you to help her sort some of her things,” said George eventually. “Do a bit of labeling, filing, and packing. I told you she’s leaving the camp for good in a few months. She can do with the help.”
“Of course,” she said, still not looking at him.
“It’s only ten days, Grace. It means a lot to me. To be here. It’s the only chance I’ll have. Please be reasonable.” He raised his arms. “Look at this place. Isn’t it magnificent?”
She sniffed.
He went on, “It’s nothing like Cambridge. Or Tewkesbury. Nothing like anything you’ve seen before.”
“Thank God,” she muttered, stepping past him to descend the hill.
Grace led the way until the camp came into view, when she moved aside to allow her father to go ahead. She followed at a distance, watching as he carefully picked his way around the spiny bushes that lined the path. George Clark was a cautious, meticulous man—except when it came to her and her mother Eleanor, thought Grace. He’d trained as an archaeologist because he was curious, but also, he said, because he liked the idea of searching for clues and then painstakingly filling in the blanks. He enjoyed the slow pace and thoughtfulness required to examine, unravel, and reconstruct the past.
He stopped, turned to her, and gestured at a cluster of tall, pointed plants growing alongside the path. “Sisal,” said George. “Originally from Mexico but grows wild here now. Olduvai means ‘place of the sisal’ in Maasai. Actually, it’s a misspelling. It should be ‘Oldupai,’ with a p, not a v.”
Grace gave a tiny, dismissive shrug. As he walked away, she stepped closer to the plants and touched the sharp, rigid tip of one of the lance-shaped leaves. She stifled a cry when the spike impaled her finger, and as she watched a tiny drop of blood balloon, Grace thought how George might’ve warned her to beware of the sisal rather than the animals.
With almost everyone else having gone to the dig for the morning, the camp was quiet but for the crunching of their footsteps as father and daughter made their way between the huts, tents, mishmash of other small buildings, windmills, water tanks, and trucks. Earlier, Grace had sniffed dust lightly infused with smoke from the kitchen. Now she breathed in dust that was lightly scented with mint.
Dr. Leakey’s whereabouts were marked by the presence of her dogs, who lay outside her large workroom. The space was enclosed on three sides with stone walls and covered by a thatch roof. An open front looked south across the gorge toward the imposing extinct volcano, which, said the man who’d driven George and Grace to the camp the previous day, was called Lemagrut. The self-assured-looking young dalmatian—Grace had heard someone call him Matt earlier—gave them an indifferent glance from his sandy station in the sun. However, the scrawny mongrel—he with the throwaway name, Brown Dog—stood and ambled to them, his skinny torso and long tail whip- ping left and right in feverish greeting. Grace paused to pat him.
“Come,” said George, tipping his head toward the room.
Brown Dog followed, but when he drew close, Matt gave a deep growl. The mongrel slumped and, head and tail low, slunk back to his spot in the sand. Alone in the workroom, Dr. Leakey leaned over a large table, strewn with rocks, bones, books, and papers. She raised her head, flicked a gray lock from where it lay above the right lens of her spectacles, and considered Grace briefly before looking down once more. George gave Grace a tight smile and clasped his hands together like an anxious schoolboy. Grace looked away. He was embarrassing.
A lifeless, half-smoked cigar rested on a pile of papers as if it had been gently extinguished and ceremoniously laid there for future revival. Grace took the opportunity to examine Dr. Leakey, taking in her small, lean frame, dusty tennis shoes, too-short khaki trousers, and pale-blue cap-sleeved blouse. She imagined her mother’s response.
“Women of a certain age shouldn’t wear short sleeves and, my God, when did that head last darken the basin of a salon?”
Grace felt warm, as if her mother’s imagined words resonated around the room.
Certainly, Dr. Leakey’s arms were freckled and a little wrinkly, but they were also strong and tanned. The imprint of her sun hat encircled her bare head in a sweaty ring. The top half of her hair was pressed flat against her skull, while below the indent left by the hat, it billowed as if eager to escape. Before she fell ill, Grace’s mother wouldn’t have made her way to the bathroom first thing in the morning half as disheveled. Grooming and style were clearly not priorities at Olduvai Gorge—though Grace suspected they might never be important to Mary Leakey.
“So, Grace, is it?” said Dr. Leakey, slowly straightening her back and lifting her eyes to look at Grace.
“Yes,” she replied, so startled by the intense blue of Dr. Leakey’s eyes that she almost clutched her hands together the way her father had.
The woman nodded. “Hmm. We haven’t had anyone your age in camp since my sons were teens,” said Dr. Leakey, transferring her gaze to George, who gave a short, inane chortle.
“What can you do?” she asked, addressing Grace once more.
“‘Do’? Um, well, um, what do you mean?” she replied, adjusting the band fastening her long light-brown hair in a ponytail.
“What are your strengths, girl? Are you good with numbers? Words? Detail?”
Grace’s stomach roiled. She wasn’t good with numbers, words, or anything else. When her mother fell ill more than four years ago, Grace had taken care of her. She’d run errands, fed and bathed Eleanor, and kept her company, making sure she was as comfortable as possible. Grace had only followed the doctor’s orders. She had no other skills.
“She’s very organized. Responsible,” said George.
Grace looked at her feet. She was struck by how desperate her father sounded. Organized? Responsible? How would he know? What did that even mean? She glanced up. Dr. Leakey was staring at her.
“Good, good,” said the older woman, her tone suddenly pensive. It was as if she’d lost interest in them and was thinking about something important. After a moment, she looked at Grace’s father—who shifted awkwardly from foot to foot—and said snappily, “That’ll do. Thanks, George. You can go. We’ll see you at lunchtime.”
George looked at Grace, blinking nervously, the way a small boy might look at his mother at the gates on his first day of school. Grace gazed outside to where Brown Dog lay. He, too, was watching her.
“See you later, George,” said Dr. Leakey firmly.
He mumbled goodbye, turned, and left. Grace didn’t move. Dr. Leakey picked up the half-smoked cigar.
“Come,” she said, gesturing outside. “Let’s take the dogs for a short stroll before it gets too hot.”
Matt and Brown Dog scrambled to their feet to greet their mistress when she stepped outside. Grace followed as Dr. Leakey made her way past the buildings and tents, which, George had explained the night before, served as offices, laboratories, accommodations, storage for excavated material, and other work areas. At the kitchen, where a fire smoldered beneath a large black kettle, Dr. Leakey carefully extracted a long, thin piece of firewood, relit her cigar, and replaced the kindle.
They walked for several minutes without speaking. The dogs trotted up the dusty tracks in front of them, and Dr. Leakey smoked. Eventually, after she’d discharged a sizable cloud of curling white smoke, the older woman spoke.
“What is it you’re afraid of?” she asked. “Afraid of?” echoed Grace.
“When I asked about your strengths, you looked terrified. I don’t expect you to edit my book or make deliberations on artifacts. Good grief, no! It’s not that kind of work. Is that what you’re worried about?”
“No,” said Grace. “Well then?”
“It’s just…well…”
Dr. Leakey stopped and turned to Grace. Brown Dog and Matt stood still too. Three pairs of eyes were locked on hers.
“Go on,” said Dr. Leakey.
Grace stared at her. She felt angry but wasn’t sure why. It was bad enough that she had to come to Africa with her father. Now she was being forced to explain herself to a strange old woman who seemed determined to humiliate her.
She held her gaze. “I’m not afraid. It’s just that I haven’t done a lot since my mother became ill.”
“Your mother’s ill?” “Dead,” said Grace.
Dr. Leakey glanced at her cigar—now a mere stub between her fingers—let it fall, and ground it into the sand beneath her canvas shoe.
“I see,” she said, sounding as annoyed as Grace felt.
The girl looked down to where the remnants of the charred tobacco had been pulverized. She recalled Father Donald’s words at the funeral: “We commit this body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
“How old are you?” asked Dr. Leakey. “Seventeen,” said Grace.
