She begins life as a baby with "a face like a bowl of porridge, pale as a painted floor." She is to end it as a biologist of unique accomplishments, mentioned in the same breath with the great evolutionists Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin.

In the more than eighty years in between, she will know extraordinary wealth and almost total deprivation. She will experience the heights of passion and the depths of loneliness. She will very nearly circle the globe in search of answers, both to scientific mysteries and to the inexplicable riddles of the human heart.

She is Alma Whittaker, the heroine of Elizabeth Gilbert's panoramic novel, and she is one of the most memorable creations in the current generation of American fiction.