Showing 1001–1020 of 1258 results

The Last Train to Zona Verde

£10.48 £10.16
Brief Summary The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari Following the success of the acclaimed Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and The Great Railway Bazaar, The Last Train to Zona Verde is an ode to the last African journey of the world's most celebrated travel writer. "Happy again, back in the kingdom of light,” writes Paul Theroux as he sets out on a new journey through the continent he knows and loves best. Theroux first came to Africa as a twenty-two-year-old Peace Corps volunteer, and the pull of the vast land never left him. Now he returns, after fifty years on the road, to explore the little-traveled territory of western Africa and to take stock both of the place and of himself. His odyssey takes him northward from Cape Town, through South Africa and Namibia, then on into Angola, wishing to head farther still until he reaches the end of the line. Journeying alone through the greenest continent, Theroux encounters a world increasingly removed from both the itineraries of tourists and the hopes of postcolonial independence movements. Leaving the Cape Town townships, traversing the Namibian bush, passing the browsing cattle of the great sunbaked heartland of the savanna, Theroux crosses "the Red Line” into a different Africa: "the improvised, slapped-together Africa of tumbled fences and cooking fires, of mud and thatch,” of heat and poverty, and of roadblocks, mobs, and anarchy. After 2,500 arduous miles, he comes to the end of his journey in more ways than one, a decision he chronicles with typically unsparing honesty in a chapter called "What Am I Doing Here?” Vivid, witty, and beautifully evocative, The Last Train to Zona Verde is a fitting final African adventure from the writer whose gimlet eye and effortless prose have brought the world to generations of readers. ISBN:9780618839339 Author:Paul Theroux

No Turning Back A Novel of South Africa

£9.48 £9.21
Brief Summary Escaping from his violent stepfather, twelve-year-old Sipho heads for Johannesburg, where he has heard that gangs of children live on the streets. Surviving hunger and bitter-cold winter nights is hard ‘but learning when to trust in the ‘new' South Africa proves even more difficult. No Turning Back appeared on the short list of both the Guardian and Smarties book prizes on the United Kingdom. " ISBN:9780064407496 Author:Beverley Naidoo

The Double Comfort Safari Club

£7.75 £7.57
Brief Summary Readers will agree that this touching and dramatic new installment in Alexander McCall Smith’s beloved and best-selling series is the finest yet. In this story, Precious Ramotswe deals with issues of mistaken identity and great fortune against the beautiful backdrop of Botswana’s remote and striking Okavango Delta. Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi head to a safari camp to carry out a delicate mission on behalf of a former guest who has left one of the guides a large sum of money. But once they find their man, Precious begins to sense that something is not right. To make matters worse, shortly before their departure Mma Makutsi’s fiancé, Phuti Radiphuti, suffers a debilitating accident, and when his aunt moves in to take care of him, she also pushes Mma Makutsi out of the picture. Could she be trying to break up the relationship? Finally, a local priest and his wife independently approach Mma Ramotswe with concerns of infidelity, creating a rather unusual and tricky situation. Nevertheless, precious is confident that with a little patience, kindness and good sense things will work out for the best, something that will delight her many fans. ISBN:9780375424502 Author:Alexander McCall Smith

Of Beasts and Beings

£9.48 £9.21
Brief Summary In this searing and timely novel, reminiscent of the work of J.M. Coetzee and Cormac McCarthy, the devastating effects of a country's economic and moral collapse provide the backdrop for a story about individual fortitude and conscience. In an unnamed and post-apocalyptic African republic, militiamen seize a scavenger as he is digging for roots, or anything that will nourish him and keep him alive. He is traded and ransomed and ends up in the hands of another group, whose members include a pregnant woman whom he is forced to carry in a wheelbarrow on a nightmarish and seemingly endless overland journey. This story alternates with the diary entries of a white schoolteacher who, embittered by the horrific state of his country, is preparing to leave. Before he can do so, however, he must confront his own demons and personal failings. Both narrators are in danger and both are apparently helpless to control their fates. When these two plotlines brilliantly and surprisingly unite the result is electrifying, shocking, and brilliant. With sparse and heartbreaking prose Ian Holding asks vital questions about personal responsibility, choice, and truth. ISBN:9781609450540 Author:Ian Holding

The Kalahari Typing School for Men

£8.98 £8.73
Brief Summary Life is never without its problems. Will Precious Ramotswe’s delightfully cunning and profoundly moral methods save the day? Find out in this, the fourth volume in the No.1 Ladies Detective Agency series featuring Botswana's first and only lady detective. Now that The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (the only detective agency for ladies and others in Botswana) is established, its founder, Precious Ramotswe, can look upon her life with pride: she’s reached her late thirties ("the finest age to be"), has a house, two children, a good fiancé -- Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni -- and many satisfied customers. But life is never without its problems. It turns out that her adopted son is responsible for the dead hoopoe bird in the garden; her assistant, Mma Makutsi, wants a husband and needs help with her idea to open the Kalahari Typing School for Men; yet Mma Ramotswe’s sexist rival has no trouble opening his Satisfaction Guaranteed Detective Agency across town. Will Precious Ramotswe’s delightfully cunning and profoundly moral methods save the day? Follow the continuing story of Botswana’s first lady detective in the irresistible The Kalahari Typing School for Men. ISBN:9780349117041 Author:Alexander McCall Smith

The Girl Was Mine by David Karanja

£8.00 £7.75
In The Girl Was Mine, Douglas Kamau struggles to keep Nancy Wanja his girlfriend, but the prevailing forces almost cost him his life. Whether or not Douglas emerges victorious is the ultimate question. The world favors rich tycoons like Tim Matthews and makes them confident that they can have anything they want, even the love of an unwilling young woman. Nancy's father Waihenya will do anything for money and position.  

Unyielding Hope the Life and times

£7.75 £7.57
Brief Summary A biography of Koitaleel Somoei, the leader of the Nandi people of Kenya who headed the resistance to the British invasion of Kenya at the end of the nineteenth century. Worldreader proudly presents this story in a new series of children’s and young adult books from the developing world. Worldreader is a non-profit organization committed to delivering digital books to children and families in the developing world using e-book technology. By purchasing this book you directly contribute to this effort by helping fund school literacy programs, and promote the writing and publication of great books from local authors everywhere. " ISBN:2030301004002 Author: Kipchoge Araap Chomu

The Lower River

£9.25 £8.99
Brief Summary Ellis Hock never believed that he would return to Africa. He runs an old-fashioned menswear store in a small town in Massachusetts but still dreams of his Eden, the four years he spent in Malawi with the Peace Corps, cut short when he had to return to take over the family business. When his wife leaves him, taking the family home, he realizes that there is one place for him to go: back to Malawi on the remote Lower River, where he can be happy again. Arriving at the dusty village, he finds it transformed: the school he built is a ruin, the church and clinic are gone, and poverty and apathy have set in among the people. They remember him — the White Man with no fear of snakes — and welcome him. But is his new life, his journey back, an escape or a trap? Interweaving memory and desire, hope and despair, salvation and damnation, this is a hypnotic, compelling, and brilliant return to a terrain no one has ever written better about than Theroux. ISBN:9780241957745 Author:Paul Theroux

Beneath the Lions Gaze by Maaza Mengiste

£14.00 £13.45
An epic tale of a father and two sons, of betrayals and loyalties, of a family unraveling in the wake of Ethiopia’s revolution. This memorable, heartbreaking story opens in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1974, on the eve of a revolution. Yonas kneels in his mother’s prayer room, pleading to his god for an end to the violence that has wracked his family and country. His father, Hailu, a prominent doctor, has been ordered to report to jail after helping a victim of state-sanctioned torture to die. And Dawit, Hailu’s youngest son, has joined an underground resistance movement—a choice that will lead to more upheaval and bloodshed across a ravaged Ethiopia. Beneath the Lion’s Gaze tells a gripping story of family, of the bonds of love and friendship set in a time and place that has rarely been explored in fiction. It is a story about the lengths human beings will go in pursuit of freedom and the human price of a national revolution. Emotionally gripping, poetic, and indelibly tragic, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze is a transcendent and powerful debut.

The Book of Memory by Petina Gappah

£13.95 £12.45
Brief Summary Memory is an albino woman languishing in Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison in Harare, Zimbabwe, where she has been convicted of murder. As part of her appeal, her lawyer insists that she write down what happened as she remembers it. As her story unfolds, Memory reveals that she has been tried and convicted for the murder of Lloyd Hendricks, her adopted father. But who was Lloyd Hendricks? Why does Memory feel no remorse for his death? And did everything happen exactly as she remembers? In The Book of Memory, Petina Gappah has created a uniquely slippery narrator: forthright, acerbically funny, and with a complicated relationship to the truth. Moving between the townships of the poor and the suburbs of the rich, and between the past and the present, Gappah weaves a compelling tale of love, obsession, the relentlessness of fate, and the treachery of memory.

The Fever Tree by Jennifer McVeigh

£11.50 £10.50
Brief Summary Having drawn comparisons to Gone with the Wind and Out of Africa, The Fever Tree is a page-turner of the very first order. In London she was caged by society. In South Africa, she is dangerously free. Frances Irvine, left destitute in the wake of her father’s sudden death, has been forced to abandon her life of wealth and privilege in London and immigrate to the Southern Cape of Africa. 1880 South Africa is a country torn apart by greed. In this remote and inhospitable land she becomes entangled with two very different men—one driven by ambition, the other by his ideals. Only when the rumor of a smallpox epidemic takes her into the dark heart of the diamond mines does she see her path to happiness. But this is a ruthless world of avarice and exploitation, where the spoils of the rich come at a terrible human cost and powerful men will go to any lengths to keep the mines in operation. Removed from civilization and disillusioned by her isolation, Frances must choose between passion and integrity, a decision that has devastating consequences. The Fever Tree is a compelling portrait of colonial South Africa, its raw beauty and deprivation alive in equal measure. But above all it is a love story about how—just when we need it most—fear can blind us to the truth.

Children of the Revolution

£9.98 £9.68
Brief Summary Seventeen years after fleeing the revolutionary Ethiopia that claimed his father's life, Stepha Stephanos is a man still caught between two existences: the one he left behind, aged nineteen, and the new life he has forged in Washington D.C. Sepha spends his days in a sort of limbo: quietly running his grocery store into the ground, revisiting the Russian classics, and toasting the old days with his friends Kenneth and Joseph, themselves emigrants from Africa. But when a white woman named Judith moves next door with her only daughter, Naomi, Sepha's life seems on the verge of change... ISBN:9780099502739 Author:Dinaw Mengestu

Nairobi A Night Guide

£8.98 £8.73
Brief Summary Nairobi: A Night Guide through the City-in-the-Sun Nairobi is fascinating. It is a vibrant, eccentric and extreme city made up of different and contradictory worlds. Nairobi is also an elusive city; difficult to comprehend and fully penetrate. What a better guide can there be than Tony Mochama, the notorious and popular chronicler of Nairobi’s urban life? Haunted by his doppelganger the Night Runner—a naked, mad and mythical being who, in popular rural Kenyan imagination, runs from house to house casting spells - Mochama will carry you along on his journeys through Nairobi. His is a declaration of love for the ‘city in the sun’, after the sun has gone down. "How can I describe how it is to Night Run; to step of the precipice of dusk and into the dark? Or how, in the dim lights of a club, the eyes of strangers always look mysterious, giving people a depth, a danger even, of which they are devoid of by day?" " ISBN:2030301004792 Author:Tony Mochama

Explorers of the Nile

£11.48 £11.11
Brief Summary Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure Nothing obsessed explorers of the mid-nineteenth century more than the quest to discover the source of the White Nile. It was the planet's most elusive secret, the prize coveted above all others. Between 1856 and 1876, six larger-than-life men and one extraordinary woman accepted the challenge. Showing extreme courage and resilience, Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, James Augustus Grant, Samuel Baker, Florence von Sass, David Livingstone, and Henry Morton Stanley risked their lives and reputations in the fierce competition. Award-winning author Tim Jeal deploys fascinating new research to provide a vivid tableau of the unmapped "Dark Continent," its jungle deprivations, and the courage—as well as malicious tactics—of the explorers. On multiple forays launched into east and central Africa, the travelers passed through almost impenetrable terrain and suffered the ravages of flesh-eating ulcers, paralysis, malaria, deep spear wounds, and even death. They discovered Lakes Tanganyika and Victoria and became the first white people to encounter the kingdoms of Buganda and Bunyoro. Jeal weaves the story with authentic new detail and examines the tragic unintended legacy of the Nile search that still casts a long shadow over the people of Uganda and Sudan. ISBN:9780300187397 Author:Tim Jeal

The Carnivorous City

£11.25 £10.89
Brief Summary Rabato Sabato aka Soni Dike is a Lagos big boy; a criminal turned grandee, with a beautiful wife, a seaside mansion and a questionable fortune. Then one day he disappears and his car is found in a ditch, music blaring from the speakers. Soni's older brother, Abel Dike, a teacher, arrives in Lagos to look for his missing brother. Abel is rapidly sucked into the unforgiving Lagos maelstrom where he has to navigate encounters with a motley cast of common criminals, deal with policemen intent on getting a piece of the pie, and contend with his growing attraction to his brother's wife. Carnivorous City is a story about love, family and just desserts but it is above all a tale about Lagos and the people who make the city by the lagoon what it is. ISBN:9781911115243 Author:Toni Kan

A Primates Memoir by Robert M. Sapolsky

£11.48 £11.00
A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life among the Baboons. In the tradition of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, Robert Sapolsky, a foremost science writer and recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, tells the mesmerizing story of his twenty-one years in remote Kenya with a troop of Savannah baboons. "I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla,” writes Robert Sapolsky in this witty and riveting chronicle of a scientist’s coming-of-age in remote Africa. An exhilarating account of Sapolsky & and twenty-one-year study of a troop of rambunctious baboons in Kenya, A Primate’s Memoir interweaves serious scientific observations with wry commentary about the challenges and pleasures of living in the wilds of the Serengeti — for man and beast alike. Over two decades, Sapolsky survives culinary atrocities, gunpoint encounters, and a surreal kidnapping, while witnessing the encroachment of the tourist mentality on the farthest vestiges of unspoiled Africa. As he conducts unprecedented physiological research on wild primates, he becomes ever more enamored of his subjects — unique and compelling characters in their own right — and he returns to them summer after summer, until tragedy finally prevents him. By turns hilarious and poignant, A Primate’s Memoir is a magnum opus from one of our foremost science writers.

Quest for Liberty by Gikonyo Kiano

£16.50 £14.00
When the history of Kenya is told, a number of people feature prominently. One such person is Dr Julius Gikonyo Kiano, a politician who put Kenya before self. Dr Kiano was the first Kenyan to earn a doctorate degree, and the first African to teach at the Royal Technical College, now University of Nairobi. His story enumerates Kenya's struggle for independence and the role played by various nationalists in this noble cause. Quest for Liberty represents the acme of Dr Kiano's life as a politician. He was among those who negotiated for a new constitution at Lancaster House Conference just before Independence. As a dedicated minister in both Kenyatta and Moi cabinets, he implemented various notable programmes such as the Africanisation initiative that set the country on the path to economic independence. The famous airlifts to America that saw hundreds of young Kenyans enrol in universities in the US was his brainchild together with the late Tom Mboya.

Tick Bite Fever

£10.48 £10.16
Brief Summary Tick Bite Fever is the unconventional memoir of a very unconventional childhood. In the early Seventies, Dave Bennun's family transplanted themselves from Swindon to the wilds of Kenya. His father, who was a doctor, had lived in Africa before (but had felt it expedient to leave when the South African government realized he was carting explosives around in the boot of his car for the ANC). But for Dave, Kenya was be musingly new. It would be his home for the next 16 years. In Kenya, the childhood memoir takes on a surreal tone. On the way home from school, closed because a pair of lions are padding around the playground, Dave is mugged by baboons. Meet Dave's favorite pet Achilles, the almost indestructible dog! Find out about 'Nairobi snow' - and the national radio station that only has three records. And read about Dave and his Dad spending happy Sunday afternoons being chased by a herd of elephants. Enchantingly funny, Tick Bite Fever is a tale of the fading innocence of childhood that is miles ahead of the competition. ISBN:9780091886899 Author:David Bennun

The Sad Artist and Other Fairytales

£12.48 £12.06
Brief Summary In Ndiritu Wahome's first published book, he charms, tantalizes and engages his readers with a collection of fairytales for all ages. From a story-telling weaver bird to a chief's son who finds the real value of life, Wahome leads his readers on a captivating journey that deifies time and reality yet remains relevant. Wahome says his "objective was to create fantasy stories, which were infused with realism in the hope of letting young children know that even though life is full of hardships, they can overcome and achieve anything they so deemed." But peel back another layer, and The Sad Artist and Other Fairytales has a strong message that reveals "bad leadership, appalling politics, sloth and corruption" that Wahome says is too often found in contemporary African governments. "The Sad Artist is magical realism at its best. Wahome's fairytales are in the tradition of Salmon Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Ben Okri," says publisher Catherine Rayburn-Trobaugh. "Ndiritu captures the innocence of the world through a child's eyes to make strong statements about the modern condition." Although the fairytales are set in a mystical version Wahome's native Kenya, they transcend Africa for a global perspective on the realities of life in the 21st century at the crossroads of old and new. Although Wahome's fairytales can sometimes be cautionary, he never loses hope for both humanity and its future. His world is one that "The wicked, who seem to live the good life, in the end, suffer in their demise. The good, even though exposed to a life of poverty, wretchedness, and solitude, end up living happily ever after." ISBN:9780692236628 Author:Ndiritu Wahome

One Life too Many by Yusuf Dawood

£7.48 £7.31
Brief Summary Sydney Walker, young and carefree, came to Kenya in search of adventure, fell in love with the country and decided to make it his home. This is the story of the joys and sorrows of a man who worked hard and loved even harder. A magnificent account of expatriate life, set in the awe- inspiring beauty of Kenya, it confirms Yusuf K. Dawood as one of the greatest storytellers of our time.