Her debut book, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (Random House, 2001), was a New York Times Notable Book for 2002, the 2002 Booksense best non-fiction book, a finalist for the Guardian’s First Book Award and the winner of the 2002 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. Fuller weaves together painful family tragedy with a wider understanding of the ambivalence of being part of a separatist white farming community in the midst of Black African independence. She describes the different songs of the birds, the many kinds of African smoke (cigarette smoke, wood smoke, the smoke of mosquito coils), even the various kinds of heat. I would have never have dreamed of reading a book about Africa; the country just never appealed to me.

The book was hard to enjoy at times since my mind was often on the children, and I kept questioning the parent's reason for bringing them to Africa during such a turbulent time.I spent so much time with Bobo and her family and yet when I got to the last sentence, I felt like I barely knew her. The family moves from farm to farm, so it would be easy to describe the land, in its exoticism, as endlessly various and endlessly the same, but Fuller has a talent for difference.

It is amazing that I can love an author in one book and, literally, put the other books in the For Sale pile. Here it is so hot that “the flamboyant tree outside cracks to itself, as if already anticipating how it will feel to be on fire”.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. There was so little introspection, so little emotional reaction to anything, and the end of the book was so rushed, that at the end I was disappointed. The children are sexually assaulted by a neighbour, and the response is the same: “Don’t exaggerate. Alexandra Fuller's story of her life as a child growing up in Rhodesia and various other East African countries in the late sixties, seventies and eighties is a gritty, uncompromising account of a family determined to continue in the colonial tradition of white farmers, despite the huge political and social changes occurring around them. Besides, reading all the books about war, including the Second World War, the Holocaust events, the French Revolution, Africa and Asian wars, we can conclude that nobody should complain since the person standing next to you might have had it much worse (a thought from "Small Island" written by Andrea Levy).

It was a unique perspective that at times took me far out of my comfort zone, and made me consider how varied individuals’ viewpoints and experiences can be, even when growing up at roughly the same time. Meanwhile, her parents sleep with loaded guns by their beds, and her mother sews a camouflage band to cover her father’s watch, to keep him safe. NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A worthy heir to Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham, Alexandra Fuller shares visceral memories of her childhood in Africa, and of her headstrong, unforgettable mother. And she instilled in Bobo, particularly, a love of reading and of storytelling that proved to be her salvation.I also really wanted to delve deep into the Fullers reasons for wanting to live on a continent that they found so inhospitable--both in terms of terrain and in terms of constant violence they encountered. Though it is a diary of an unruly life in an often inhospitable place, it is suffused with Fuller's endearing ability to find laughter, even when there is little to celebrate. The politics and the everyday struggle to make a living from the land are mixed with family tragedy; a sister drowned, a brother dead from meningitis and another stillborn. This was a great book, pulling me into a very different world from my own, but describing everything in a brisk, vivid way that made it easy to picture. When she is obliged to wash in water a black child has used she is surprised to discover that “Nothing happens … I do not break out in spots or a rash.