Going Back

About the Book

This epic begins in England where Kiron Griffith, an American graduate student at Cambridge University, makes the staggering discovery that inherited fossil memory causes him to experience life alternatively in two widely-apart times and places: as a man in today´s England...and as a woman ancestor in Africa´s primeval past. As a woman Kiron lives in a cave as a member of a matriarch-led clan of African hunter gatherers from which she eventually flees to lead a polyandrous life with two mates of her own, each man of a different race. She is challenged to make fire, re-invents pottery, the bow and arrow, and makes an iron knife from meteor fragment. She is captured by pygmies and later raises a cheetah as a friend and hunting ally. Eventually alone and defenseless she must give birth on the open savanna surrounded by hyenas which wait instinctively for her moment of greatest vulnerability.

About the Author

Kevin Duffy, Ph.D. read anthropology at England’s Cambridge University and worked for 20 years in Africa where he learned to speak four African languages and had a road named after him in Zambia. He has written two nonfiction books on Africa, BLACK ELEPHANT HUNTER and CHILDREN OF THE FOREST, the latter and its related award-winning documentary film being widely used in teaching anthropology. He shared an EMMY AWARD for the TV series, FACES OF CULTURE. Here he has skillfully applied the craft of novel writing to an authentic and fascinating work and was honored by having a road in Zambia named after him.