OBSESSIVE NATURE

New York Times Bestselling author Kathryn Aalto traces the extraordinary lives and mysterious end of two explorers divided only by time: Scotsman David Douglas, who’d risen from local landscaper to one of the most celebrated botanists in the world, found dead in a pit in 1834 Hawaii under unsolved circumstances; and Marc Salak, an American artist-palaeontologist, a genius more interested in plants than people who collected poisonous florae for fun, never once had an email address, and – at thirty five, the same age as Douglas 150 years before – vanished in a crocodile-infested river in Namibia. Through years of research, interviews, and investigation, and beside Aalto’s own personal travel narratives as she follows in their footsteps, we journey beside two who searched the wildest corners of the world for new life and an existence far from a society they both scorned and dreaded.