— By B. G. Nettelton
Romance doesn’t always arrive with candlelight and violin music. Sometimes it lands you—literally—in the middle of nowhere, with lions on the horizon and a pilot in khaki extending a hand.
I didn’t expect to find love in Africa. In fact, I was running from it.
After a rocky chapter in an eight-year relationship back in Australia, I convinced myself that a return to the country of my father’s birth might offer clarity. I’d recently discovered my grandfather’s pictorial diaries from the 1920s—snapshots of a bygone colonial world that called to something deep within me.
What began as a personal pilgrimage turned into something much more life-altering.
Because it wasn’t long before I met the handsome, capable bush pilot whose rugged charm proved far more compelling than any safe life I’d left behind. The wilderness rewrote the story I thought I was living—and within weeks, I was delighted by a marriage proposal.
That raw, unpredictable intensity—the way life can change in a heartbeat under Africa’s vast skies—is at the heart of every story I write in my Wings Over Africa series.
Love, Danger, and the Untamed Landscape
There’s something about the African wilderness that amplifies everything: risk, emotion, desire. Whether it's the roar of lions outside your tent, or the uncertainty of a dirt airstrip landing, the stakes are always high.
That intensity translates perfectly into fiction.
In Whispers in the Kalahari, a struggling marriage is tested in the dry heart of Botswana, as secrets and danger stir beneath the red sands. In Diamond Mountain, forbidden love blossoms at 11,000 feet in the snow-dusted peaks of Lesotho, where political intrigue and colonial tensions mirror the heroine’s internal conflict. Even in the prequel novella Shadows over the Okavango, set in a remote safari camp, passion simmers alongside peril as a woman fleeing emotional control must decide whether the man who tempts her is her rescuer or her captor.
Romance Rooted in Reality
What sets these stories apart isn’t just the romance or the suspense—it’s the grounding in real places and experiences. I’ve felt the dry wind of the Kalahari, watched a baby giraffe being born beside a camel-thorn tree, and skimmed over ilala palms in a Cessna to frighten a pride of lions from the dirt runway.
These aren’t just postcard-perfect settings—they’re alive with dust and thunder and history. The perfect place to test a character's mettle—and heart.
Why the Wild Works
In romantic fiction, setting is more than scenery. It’s a mirror. It reflects a character’s fear and hope, and it strips them bare. The African wilderness—with its stark beauty, its unpredictability, and its demand for courage—forces my characters to confront what they truly want. There’s no room for pretence when your survival (or your happiness) is on the line.
And sometimes, in the wildest places, you find not just the truth—but the love story you never saw coming.