When Alexanra "Bo" Fuller was in Zambia a few years ago visiting her parents, she asked her father about a nearby banana farmer who was known for being a "tough bugger". Her father's response was a warning to steer clear of him: "Curiosity scribbled the cat," he told Bo. Nonetheless, Fuller began her strange friendship with the man she calls K, a white African and veteran of the Rhodesian War. With the same fiercely beautiul prose that won her such acclaim for Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Fuller here recounts her friendship with K. He is, seemingly, a man of contradictions. Tattooed, battle-scarred, and weathered by farm work, K is a lion of a man, feral and bulletproof. Yet he is also a born-again Christian, given to weeping when he recollects his failed romantic life and welling up inside with memories of battle. For his war, like all wars, was a brutal one, marked by racial strife, jungle battles, brutal tortures, and the murdering of innocent civilians. Like all the veterans of the war, K has blood on his hands. Driven by K's memories, Fuller and K decide to enter the heart of darkness in the most literal way, by traveling from Zambia through Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) and Mozambique to visit the scenes of the war and to meet other veterans. What results from Fuller's journey is a remarkably unbiased and unsentimental glimpse at life in Africa, a land that besets its creatures with pests, plagues, and natural disasters, making the people there at once more hardened and more vulnerable than elsewhere.

Scribbling the Cat : Travels With an African Soldier

ALEXANDRA FULLER

Picador

Alexandra Fuller was the daughter of white settlers in 1970s war-torn Rhodesia. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight is a memoir of that time, when a schoolgirl was as likely to carry a shotgun as a satchel. Fuller tells a story of civil war; of a quixotic battle against nature and loss; and of her family's unbreakable bond with a continent which came to define, shape, scar and heal them. In wry and sometimes hilarious prose, she looks back with rage and love at an extraordinary family and an extraordinary time. 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

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight : An African Childhood

Biographies & Memoirs

In 1972, when Alexandra Fuller was two years old, her parents finally abandoned their English life and returned to what was then Southern Rhodesia and to the beginning of a civil war. By the time she was eight, the war was in full swing. Her parents veered from being determined farmers to being blind drunk, whilst Alexandra and her sister, the only survivors of five children, alternately take up target practice and sing Rod Stewart numbers from sunbleached rocks. This memoir is about living through a civil war; it is about losing children and losing that war, and realizing that the side you have been fighting for may well be the "wrong" one.

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

Memoirs

FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. An intimate memoir of growing up in Africa during the Rhodesian civil war of 1971 to 1979 describes a girl's life on farms in southern Rhodesia, Milawi, and Zambia, detailing her hardscrabble existence with an alcoholic mother, frequently absent father, and three lost siblings.

History

Africa

London: Picador

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

Alexandra Fuller

Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness tells the story of the author's mother, Nicola Fuller. Nicola Fuller and her husband were a glamorous and optimistic couple and East Africa lay before them with the promise of all its perfect light, even as the British Empire in which they both believed waned. They had everything, including two golden children - a girl and a boy. However, life became increasingly difficult and they moved to Rhodesia to work as farm managers. The previous farm manager had committed suicide. His ghost appeared at the foot of their bed and seemed to be trying to warn them of something. Shortly after this, one of their golden children died. Africa was no longer the playground of Nicola's childhood. They returned to England where the author was born before they returned to Rhodesia and to the civil war. The last part of the book sees the Fullers in their old age on a banana and fish farm in the Zambezi Valley. They had built their ramshackle dining room under the Tree of Forgetfulness. In local custom, this tree is the meeting place for villagers determined to resolve disputes. It is in the spirit of this Forgetfulness that Nicola finally forgot - but did not forgive - all her enemies including her daughter and the Apostle, a squatter who has taken up in her bananas with his seven wives and forty-nine children. Funny, tragic, terrifying, exotic and utterly unself-conscious, this is a story of survival and madness, love and war, passion and compassion.

Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

SIMON AND SCHUSTER

Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier [Audio Cassette] [Jan 01, 2004] Alexandra Fuller ...

Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier

RECORDED BOOKS^

The Legend of Colton H. Bryant

Arts & Literature

Recorded Books, Inc. and Blackstone Publishing

Dont Lets Go To The Dogs Tonight

Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness / unabridged

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Regional & International

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Books by ALEXANDRA FULLER