Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness
by Alexandra Fuller
Penguin (audiobook)
You might take a while to warm to the protagonist here - the author's mother, 'Nicola Fuller of Central Africa', as she liked to present herself. But daughter Alexandra Fuller's storytelling skills make this a biographical gem. Told in past and present tenses, the book flits from country to country: from Nicola's white-settler life in Kenya (where a chimpanzee named Stephen was her best friend); to Scotland, with which she felt a 'one million per cent' affinity, and from where she inherited her fey qualities; to Rhodesia and Zambia. When war, lost children and farms, and life itself overwhelms Nicola, she is admitted to the psychiatric ward of a Zimbabwean hospital to be fed happy, panic, mad and sleeping pills. But Fuller's parents were made of strong stuff, she shows, finally ending up on a fish and banana farm in the Zambezi Valley. The family's story is a potted history lesson, with, among other episodes, notes on the Mau Mau uprising. The book's narrator was an inspired choice, with just the accent needed.