Three Weeks in December — Audrey Schulman

“Two Americans have life-altering experiences in Africa a century apart in this environmentalist adventure novel” by the author of Theory of Bastards (Kirkus Reviews).
 
In 1899, Jeremy, a young engineer, leaves a small town in Maine to oversee the construction of a railroad across British East Africa. In charge of hundreds of Indian laborers, he becomes the reluctant hunter of two lions that are killing his men in nightly attacks. Plagued by fear and alienated by a secret he can tell no one, Jeremy takes increasing solace in the company of his African scout.
 
In 2000, Max, an American ethnobotanist, travels to Rwanda where she searches for an obscure vine that could become a lifesaving pharmaceutical. Stationed in the mountains, she shadows a family of gorillas -- the last of their group to survive the local poachers. But their precarious freedom is threatened as a violent rebel group from the nearby Congo draws close.
 
Told in alternating perspectives that interweave the two characters and their fates, Audrey Schulman's novel deftly confronts the struggle between progress and preservation, idiosyncrasy and acceptance.