Set in the rich farmland of California’s Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. Here Steinbeck created some of his most memorable characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity; the inexplicability of love; and the murderous consequences of love’s absence.

From the author of Half Way Down an African Moon comes an evocative account of random journeys undertaken in Africa over the last thirty years. Written at a time when the natural world everywhere is being heedlessly plundered and exploited as never before, these recollections – impassioned, comic, ironic and critical by turn – are a reminder that in everything but multi-national corporate cupidity, the damage may well be irreparable. Whether drifting in a fishing boat among lurking pods of unpredictable hippos down the Zambezi, tracing the demise of the hapless Dodo in Mauritius, trekking for lowland gorillas in the rainforests of south-east Nigeria in the company of a wryly erudite local parks ranger, or pondering the Stone Age mind-set of wealthy trophy hunters, the author's exhilaration for wildlife and nature glows through the prism of a gradually darkening lens. The current state of our natural world may look bleak but giving up on it, as he reminds us, is not an...