Pamela asked Chris Bohjalian:

Did you visit Tanzania or interview locals for your book, "The Lioness"?

Chris Bohjalian Thank you for asking, Pamela. I sure did.

The Lioness was born in a movie theater.

It was the summer of 2019 and Covid was still months away.
I had just savored a matinee and emerged from the dark into the exquisite, piercing, August daylight, an experience that reminds us all how the dusk of the cinema is a transporting, dreamlike experience, and thought to myself, “My God, movies are magic. Why have I never written a Hollywood novel?”
So, I did. I envisioned it would be set in a moment of great social and political upheaval, perhaps even my childhood in the 1960s or 1970s, and finally settled on the year 1964.

I was fortunate in that I was able to book a safari with my lovely bride before Covid would have made that impossible. (Or very less likely.) I was in the Serengeti in the autumn of 2019.

And it was the prefect book to keep me sane during the nightmare of 2020: an adventure set in a faraway land, in a world before the pandemic. I wrote it in my library in Vermont, but surrounded by all the photos my wife took, my copious notes, and all the tourism and movie magazines from the 1950s and 1960s I had amassed.

In all my books, the research matters. But it was critical to The Lioness.

I hope you enjoy it!

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