A Wild Estate

Lions on the deck. Warthog butt prints on the walls. Chair yoga at sunset.

This is what late-life reinvention looks like for David Muirhead and his wife. At seventy, they traded a manicured coastal home for a cottage deep in the South African bush, just outside Hoedspruit — the country's self-styled safari capital. After decades of journalism and wildlife writing, Muirhead now lives inside the world he used to observe from a distance.

He notices things. That wild animals don't grow old — they get eaten long before they can be considered geriatric. That an elephant has its own opinions about your morning plans. That a leopard, unhurried, makes its own argument about what really matters at this stage of life.

A Wild Estate is funny, tender, and unsentimental — a memoir of growing older with the bush watching back.