1901. Minerva Sandford is an adventure-seeker, a botanist ? and a reluctant wife. Part of a famous family of plant-hunters, she chafes at the formality and lack of autonomy in her chilly marriage, and is horrified by her sole ?purpose? being to produce a male heir. She leaps on the rare opportunity to join her husband Guy and cousin Dickon in the Amazonian jungle, searching for the fabled Belladonna orchids. No matter what the cost.
But the jungle is unforgiving, and the more Minerva delves into the wilderness, the more she discovers that danger lurks in the shadows. The tight grip of a local rubber-baron rules over swathes of forest, and as her cousin begins to succumb to malaria, she finds herself unmoored and drifting closer to local plant expert, Ana.
Following a secret map left by a dead man and haunted by the recent loss of a baby, Minerva begins to see things amongst the trees - a ghostly woman in green, plants moving in all too human ways. Is she too, succumbing to an illness? Or, more terrifying, is the jungle reaching out? And if so... why does it seem so hungry?
