Based on the life of a real, and most extraordinary, woman, Curiosity seamlessly blends history and fiction, passion and science in a breathtaking novel set in 19th-century Lyme Regis, England.

More than forty years before Darwin published of On the Origin of Species, a 12-year-old cabinet-maker's daughter named Mary Anning found the fossilized skeleton of a dolphin-like creature in the cliffs of Dorset, and spent a year chipping it from its millennia-old resting place. This was only the first of many important discoveries made by this uncommon woman; indeed, she was perhaps the most important paleontologist of her day, even though her finds were named and exhibited by the “official” scientists – all of them men.

Henry de la Beche was the son of a gentry family, owners of a slave-worked estate in Jamaica where he spent his childhood. As an adolescent in England, he ran away from military college, and soon found himself living with his elegant, cynical mother in Lyme Regis, where he pursued his passion for drawing and painting the landscapes and fossils of the area. One morning on an expedition to see an astonishing discovery – a giant skeleton – he encountered a young woman unlike anyone he had ever met.

Curiosity is a richly imagined and beautifully written tale of two very different people and of a meeting that would lead them down paths neither could ever have imagined.