This is Fuller's first book, and already she has a distinctive voice, by turns mischievous and openhearted, earthy and soaring. Her prose bristles with an unappeased love for Africa and its intense physicality (its smell of "black tea, cut tobacco, fresh fire, old sweat, young grass"). Includes 'My Africa' and 'Suggested reading' by the author. The author's honesty about her family's racism is exacting-she recounts how they cheered when they heard mines detonate along the border, because that meant Africans might have been killed-and she delivers an intimate portrait of fierce, flawed lives. One moment Fuller's mother is shooting a cobra in the pantry, the next her sister is calmly baking a cake while armed black soldiers surround the house. "We might shoot you." This memoir of a stubborn, down-on-their-luck, often drunk white family making a last stand against African independence reads like a hard ride over unsafe roads: hair-raising, horrific, and thrilling. Dont Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight, a memoir of life with Alexandra Fuller and her family on a farm in Rhodesia After the Rhodesian Bush War ended in 1980. "Don't startle us when we're sleeping," her mother warned her. When the author was growing up, in nineteen-seventies Rhodesia, her parents kept loaded guns by the bed.
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