The extraordinary life of heiress Patricia Cavendish O'Neill took a turn for the unexpected when she moved from Kenya to settle on a Cape farm in 1968. Here Pat found a new channel for her remarkable gift with animals: she became one of South Africa's first woman racehorse trainers. As always, Pat and her famous mother attracted a colourful international audience into their extremely lavish lifestyle and the two women would regularly fly to Australia to bid on some of the world's finest fillies and colts. Broadlands Stud went from glory to glory in racing circles.

Pat's first book, A Lion in the Bedroom, described how, after a life of flitting around the world from bases in the South of France and the Bahamas, she found her place in the world in Kenya when she was given a lion cub to raise. In the Rift Valley a pet gazelle accompanied her lioness on glamorous safaris, and in South Africa the pampered racehorses of Broadlands shared their space with a menagerie of equally beloved baboons, vervet monkeys, various farm animals saved from their fate, cats, parrots and - at one point - 35 dogs. But queen of the farm, a rescued chimpanzee named Kalu has found her way deepest into Pat's heart.

A Chimpanzee in the Wine Cellar is Pat's newest book, rich in anecdotes that will make you laugh and cry. Now in her late eighties, Pat leads a very different life from the enormous wealth into which she was born, yet she still remains true to her first love of animals.