Man in a Cage dramatizes the true story of American naturalist Richard Garner's journey to west Africa in 1892. Garner makes his home in a cage deep in an African forest to learn the language of chimpanzees. Populated by bureaucrats, hunters, missionaries, and the indigenous peoples whose lands and lives they have intruded upon, Man in a Cage evokes life on the ground during the Scramble for Africa.

"Evoking rich historical details while telling a story that feels urgently contemporary, Patrick Nevins

doesn't merely set Man in a Cage in the 1890's--he unflinchingly embodies the era in a way that will

thrill anyone with a love for deeply immersive literature. By adopting the structure and vocal timbre

of a Gilded Age novel with pitch perfection (at times it felt as though I was reading a lost manuscript

from Frank Norris--or some other long-forgotten practitioner of American Naturalism) Nevins

conjures a world of colonizers, profiteers, and missionaries--and the harm they've inflicted upon

every living thing on this planet--proving the old adage history doesn't repeat itself, but it does

indeed rhyme."