A Parisian Sultana, Vol. 1 (of 3)

Paris, 1860s. Madame Laura de Guéran is no ordinary widow. In her elegantly-appointed apartment filled with maps and accounts of distant lands, she dreams not of remarriage but of the unmapped heart of Africa. When she reads of Livingstone's exploits in the Times, something ignites. Within days, she has persuaded three bemused gentlemen to accompany her on an expedition into the continent's uncharted interior. A woman leading her own African quest in Victorian-era fiction was, in itself, radical. Belot captures something still transgressive about a widow who rejects the drawing room for the jungle, who gathers men around her through sheer force of intellect and will. The novel fizzes with the particular energy of a world being remapped, of old certainties crumbling, of a woman refusing to wait for permission to explore.