“It’s dying right before our eyes. In two years it could all be gone. Does that mean anything to you?”

On Africa’s majestic Sukula Plains, nature’s finest predators face a desperate struggle for survival. The lions of Sukula are under threat by unscrupulous trophy hunters, while the research institute that seeks to protect them is floundering through lack of funding. They need a saviour – someone to rescue the struggling Institute and secure the future for Sukula’s unique wildlife.

What they get is Bird – a hungover, disaffected washout, enslaved to the demons of his past and oblivious to the stimulants of his present. Bird blunders his way through the African landscape and somehow finds what he never knew he needed: acceptance from the local people, resurgence of his passion for the natural world, and a brutal fight for something greater than his pitiful self. But can it mend his broken soul? Does he have the resolve to see it through? And is he capable of putting this cause above his own indulgent idealism?