Cursed. Maisie Cothay has never known the feel of human flesh: born with the power to kill or resurrect at her slightest touch, she has spent her childhood sequestered in her family's manor at the edge of a mysterious forest. Maisie's father - an anthroplogist who sees her as more experiment than daughter - has warned her not to venture into the wood. Locals talk of men disappearing within, emerging with addled minds and strange stories. What he does...

A memoir by Benjamin Mee tells the true account of how the author and his family used their life savings to buy a dilapidated zoo, replete with 200 exotic animals facing destruction, in the English countryside. Mee, along with his children, had to balance caring for his wife, who was dying of brain cancer, with dealing with escaped tigers, raising endangered animals, working with an eclectic skeleton crew, and readying the zoo for a reopening.