Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

Description

How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it, or live in it. How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to. As the daughter of white settlers in war-torn 1970s Rhodesia, Alexandra Fuller remembers a time when a schoolgirl was as likely to carry a shotgun as a satchel. This is her story - of a civil war, of a quixotic battle with nature and loss, and of a family's unbreakable bond with the continent that came to define, scar and heal them. Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award in 2002, Alexandra Fuller's classic memoir of an African childhood is suffused with laughter and warmth even amid disaster. Unsentimental and unflinching, but always enchanting, it is the story of an extraordinary family in an extraordinary time.

Alexandra Fuller was born in England in 1969. She moved to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) with her family when she was two. After that country's war of independence (1980) her family moved first to Malawi and then Zambia. She came to the United States in 1994. Her book Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize in 2002 and a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award. Scribbling the Cat won the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage in 2006.

Like Frank McCourt, Fuller writes with devastating humour and directness about desperate circumstances . . . tender, remarkable * Daily Telegraph * A book that deserves to be read for generations * Guardian * Perceptive, generous, political, tragic, funny, stamped through with a passionate love for Africa . . . [Fuller] has a faultless hotline to her six-year-old self * Independent * This enchanting book is destined to become a classic of Africa and of childhood * Sunday Times * Wonderful book . . . a vibrantly personal account of growing up in a family every bit as exotic as the continent which seduced it . . . the Fuller family itself [is] delivered to the reader with a mixture of toughness and heart which renders its characters unforgettable * Scotsman * Her prose is fierce, unsentimental, sometimes puzzled, and disconcertingly honest . . . it is Fuller's clear vision, even of the most unpalatable facts, that gives her book its strength. It deserves to find a place alongside Olive Schreiner, Karen Blixen and Doris Lessing * Sunday Telegraph *