The author of "Eat, Pray, Love" presents her first novel in 12 years. It is a sweeping historical novel, a story of botany, exploration and desire spanning much of the 18th and 19th centuries, with an outstanding heroine at its heart: botanist Alma Whittaker, a woman of the Enlightened Age who stands on the cusp of the modern. It is sure to widely reviewed, as one of the major novels of the autumn. 'A writer of incandescent talent' Annie Proulx