Joan Thomas’s superb, sensitive prose brings to life the young Mary Anning as she discovers in herself both a passion and talent for finding ‘curiousities’ and vividly portrays the hauntingly beautiful, yet often deadly landscape of the Dorsetshire coast of England, where the soft cliffs shear off without warning, exposing the fossil remains of creatures buried for millennia. Curiousity is rich with historical characters whose passion for ‘fossilising’ brought them into sometimes unlikely contact.