Alexandra Fuller

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Maine

"Fuller brings Africa to life, both its natural splendor and the harsher realities of day-to-day existence, and sheds light on her parents in all their humanness--not a glaring sort of light, but the soft equatorial kind she so beautifully describes in this memoir." --Bookpage

A story of survival and war, love and madness, loyalty and forgiveness, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is an intimate exploration of Fuller's parents, whom readers first met in Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, and of the price of being possessed by Africa's uncompromising, fertile, death-dealing land. We follow Tim and Nicola Fuller hopscotching the continent, restlessly trying to establish a home. War, hardship, and tragedy follow the family even as Nicola fights to hold on to her children, her land, her sanity. But just when it seems that Nicola has been broken by the continent she loves, it is the African earth that revives and nurtures her. Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is Fuller at her very best.

Alexandra Fuller is the author of several memoirs: Travel Light, Move Fast, Leaving Before the Rains Come and Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight. 

Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness

a512c574-f630-4b9b-b8a6-ede925d63c26-1

I love Alexandra Fuller’s books on growing in the turbulent times of Africa’s self rule.  She has an unflinching look at her childhood, and what the high cost of living on the wrong side of colonialism. 

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Minnesota

Travels with an African Soldier

The author details her unique friendship with one of her parents' neighbors in Zambia, a white African and veteran of the Rhodesian war, and their mutual odyssey to revisit scenes of the war and come to terms with the horrors of warfare.

Scribbling the Cat

bbc6c7dc-4b0f-4595-82ef-0e037dec5e8b-1

An African Childhood

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

d159ed34-e896-444f-bd2a-52e74c2a023b-1

New York Times Notable Book
Entertainment Weekly #1 Nonfiction Book of the Year
Finalist, Guardian First Book Prize

Maryland

Smoke free home, pet free home. There are no writings markings or highlights in this book. Dust jacket is in great condition. Tiny bit of creasing at the top. Yellow dots on the top outer edge pages of the book. Please see photos.

Massachusetts

When the ship veered into the Cape of Good Hope, Mum caught the spicy, heady scent of Africa on the changing wind. She smelled the people: raw onions and salt, the smell of people who are not afraid to eat meat, and who smoke fish over open fires on the beach and who pound maize into meal and who work out-of-doors. She held me up to face the earthy air, so that the fingers of warmth pushed back my black curls of hair, and her pale green eyes went clear-glassy. “Smell that,” she whispered, “that’s home.” Vanessa was running up and down the deck, unaccountably wild for a child usually so placid. Intoxicated already. I took in a faceful of African air and fell instantly into a fever. In Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller remembers her African childhood with visceral authenticity. 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. Fuller’s debut is unsentimental and unflinching but always captivating. In wry and sometimes hilarious prose, she stares down disaster and looks back with rage and love at the life of an extraordinary family in an extraordinary time. From 1972 to 1990, Alexandra Fuller–known to friends and family as Bobo–grew up on several farms in southern and central Africa. Her father joined up on the side of the white government in the Rhodesian civil war, and was often away fighting against the powerful black guerilla factions. Her mother, in turn, flung herself at their African life and its rugged farm work with the same passion and maniacal energy she brought to everything else. Though she loved her children, she was no hand-holder and had little tolerance for neediness. She nurtured her daughters in other ways: She taught them, by example, to be resilient and self-sufficient, to have strong wills and strong opinions, and to embrace life wholeheartedly, despite and because of difficult circumstances. And she instilled in Bobo, particularly, a love of reading and of storytelling that proved to be her salvation. A worthy heir to Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham, Alexandra Fuller writes poignantly about a girl becoming a woman and a writer against a backdrop of unrest, not just in her country but in her home. But Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is more than a survivor’s story. It is the story of one woman’s unbreakable bond with a continent and the people who inhabit it, a portrait lovingly realized and deeply felt.

Connecticut

The author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight traces her post-divorce confrontation of an upbringing in Africa that was overshadowed by the Rhodesian wars, her complicated parents and her courtship with her ex-husband.

Leaving Before the Rains Come

79dfbfa3-13a5-43b4-8f71-1f0284cc961c-1

Hello, and thank you for browsing The Raven's Cache! Caw! 🐦‍⬛ 
This book is pre-loved and in like new condition ready to go to its next destination. We're glad to see that this treasure has caught your eye.
Below, you can find examples of how I rate the quality before they go to their new homes. It's important to know the quality of the book you're getting, so I've taken pictures of any aspect of the book that renders it pre-loved rather than new. 
All books are shipped quickly (next business day), and come from a smoke and pet free home.


- - - - - - - - - -
✅  How The Raven's Cache rates its books:
LIKE NEW: I will never rate a library book like new. These are books that look like they've never been read or owned.
EXCELLENT: The best condition for library books, and a great condition for books otherwise. Library books will have library markings (always pictured), but will have no further noted wear and tear. For non-library books, these are the books that have been read, but are not show no remarkable signs of wear, tear or defect.
GOOD: Show signs of use and mild to moderate wear. All pages are in tact and the book is completely readable. Library books have library markings, and some non-library books may have a dedication or stamp or sticker, some creases. Signs of formerly being loved.
FAIR: A book that shows visible signs of wear and tear. These books might have creases, folds, markings, or missing dust jackets (all pictured).  A 'fair' book will ALWAYS have its pages in tact, and the full book will be readable.
POOR: These books have seen better days. The pages might be loose, there are visible signs of wear and tear, the spine might be coming free from the book.

✨ Please note that my books are often given to me and may not reflect my own views. Please research books and look at photos prior to buying. ❤️ 
I am one disabled human looking to spread kindness and get by, please be kind. 10% of my profit goes toward nonprofits aiming to making books accessible to others.

❓ If you have any questions or want to make an offer or bundle books, please message me. Let's see what we can do. 🙂

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Vermont

North Carolina

From bestselling author Alexandra Fuller, the utterly original story of her father, Tim Fuller, and a deeply felt tribute to a life well lived Six months before he died in Budapest, Tim Fuller turned to his daughter: "Let me tell you the secret to life right now, in case I suddenly give up the ghost. You wouldn't want me taking all this wisdom with me to the grave." Then he lit his pipe, and stroked his dog's, Harry's, head. Harry put his paw on his lap and they sat there the two of them, one man and his dog, keepers to the secret of life. "Well?" she asked. "Nothing comes to mind quite honestly, Bobo," he said, with some surprise. "Now that I think about it, maybe there isn't a secret to life. What do you think Harry?" Harry gave Dad a look of utter agreement. He was a very superior dog. "Well, there you have it," Dad said. After her father's sudden death, Alexandra Fuller realizes that if she is going to weather his loss, she will need to become the parts of him she misses most. So begins TRAVEL LIGHT, MOVE FAST, the unforgettable story of Tim Fuller, a self-exiled black sheep who moved to Africa to fight in the Rhodesian War before settling as a banana farmer in Zambia. A man who preferred chaos to predictability, to revel in promise rather than wallow in regret, and was more afraid of becoming bored than of getting lost, he taught his daughters to live as if everything needed to happen altogether, all at once - or not at all. Now in the wake of his death, Fuller internalizes his lessons with clear eyes, and celebrates a man who swallowed life whole. A master of time and memory, Fuller moves seamlessly between the days and months following her father's death as she and her mother return to his farm with his ashes and contend with his overwhelming absence, and her childhood spent running after him in southern and central Africa. Writing with reverent irreverence of the rollicking grand misadventures of her mother and father, bursting with pandemonium and tragedy, Fuller takes their insatiable appetite for life to heart. Here, in Fuller's Africa, is a story of joy, resilience, and vitality, from one of our finest writers.

Travel Light, Move Fast

27c66d5e-9a63-4d45-86ab-279fcd1c133a-1

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.

“This is not a book you read just once, but a tale of terrible beauty to get lost in over and over.”—Newsweek

“By turns mischievous and openhearted, earthy and soaring . . . hair-raising, horrific, and thrilling.”—The New Yorker

Though it is a diary of an unruly life in an often inhospitable place, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is suffused with Fuller’s endearing ability to find laughter, even when there is little to celebrate. Fuller’s debut is unsentimental and unflinching but always captivating. In wry and sometimes hilarious prose, she stares down disaster and looks back with rage and love at the life of an extraordinary family in an extraordinary time.

From 1972 to 1990, Alexandra Fuller—known to friends and family as Bobo—grew up on several farms in southern and central Africa. Her father joined up on the side of the white government in the Rhodesian civil war, and was often away fighting against the powerful black guerilla factions. Her mother, in turn, flung herself at their African life and its rugged farm work with the same passion and maniacal energy she brought to everything else. Though she loved her children, she was no hand-holder and had little tolerance for neediness. She nurtured her daughters in other ways: She taught them, by example, to be resilient and self-sufficient, to have strong wills and strong opinions, and to embrace life wholeheartedly, despite and because of difficult circumstances. And she instilled in Bobo, particularly, a love of reading and of storytelling that proved to be her salvation.

Alexandra Fuller writes poignantly about a girl becoming a woman and a writer against a backdrop of unrest, not just in her country but in her home. But Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is more than a survivor’s story. It is the story of one woman’s unbreakable bond with a continent and the people who inhabit it, a portrait lovingly realized and deeply felt.

Praise for Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight

“Riveting . . . [full of] humor and compassion.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
 
“The incredible story of an incredible childhood.”—The Providence Journal

Texas

New York

Florida

The tagline says “an African childhood”. But it is so much more than that.  A story of terrible beauty as the author shares what it was like to grow up in the dying throes of colonialism.  If you liked Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, you will like this.

Signs of aging and shelfwear. No markings and clean. See photos. Thank you for supporting our non-profit choir and supporting the voices of women and girls!

A great addition to Fuller’s other books.

Selected by The New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of the Year 


In Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness Alexandra Fuller returns to Africa and to her unforgettable family, whom readers first met in Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight. At the heart of this family, and central to the lifeblood of her latest story, is Fuller's iconically courageous mother, Nicola (or, Nicola Fuller of Central Africa, as she sometimes prefers to be known). Born on the Scottish Isle of Skye to a warlike clan of highlanders and raised in Kenya's perfect equatorial light, Nicola holds dear the values most likely to get you hurt or killed in Africa: loyalty to blood, passion for land, and a holy belief in the restorative power of all animals. With a lifetime of admiration behind her and after years of interviews and research, Fuller has recaptured her mother's inimitable voice with remarkable precision. Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is as funny, exotic, terrifying and unselfconscious as Nicola herself.

We see Nicola as an irrepressible child in western Kenya, then with the man who fell in love with her, Tim Fuller.  The young couple begin their life in a lavender colored honeymoon period, when east Africa lies before them with all the promise of its liquid honeyed light, even as the British empire in which they both once believed wanes. But in short order, an accumulation of mishaps and tragedies bump up against history until the Fullers find themselves in a world they hardly recognize. We follow Tim and Nicola as they hopscotch the continent, restlessly trying to establish a home, from Kenya to Rhodesia to Zambia, even returning to England briefly. War, hardship and tragedy seem to follow the family even as Nicola fights to hold onto her children, her land, her sanity.  But just when it seems that Nicola has been broken by the continent she loves, it is the African earth  - and Tim's acceptance of her love for this earth - that revives and nurtures her.

A story of survival and war, love and madness, loyalty and forgiveness, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is an intimate exploration of the author's family and of the price of being possessed by this uncompromising, fertile, death-dealing land. In the end we find Nicola and Tim at a table under their Tree of Forgetfulness in the Zambezi Valley on the banana and fish farm where they plan to spend their final days. In local custom, the Tree of Forgetfulness is where villagers meet to resolve disputes and it is here that the family at last find an African kind of peace. Following the ghosts and dreams of memory, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is Alexandra Fuller at her very best.

Alexandra Fuller is also the author of the forthcoming novel, Quiet Until the Thaw. 

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

This memoir of a childhood in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Malawi and Zambia 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.

New Jersey

South Dakota

When Alexandra ("Bo") Fuller was home in Zambia a few years ago, visiting her parents for Christmas, 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; he told Bo: "Curiosity scribbled the cat." 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 beautiful prose that won her acclaim for Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Fuller here recounts her friendship with K.

K is, seemingly, a man of contradictions: tattooed, battle scarred, and weathered by farm work, he 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 more than anything else welling up inside with memories of battle. For his war, like all wars, was a brutal one, marked by racial strife, jungle battles, unimaginable tortures, and the murdering of innocent civilians--and K, like all the veterans of the war, 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. It is a strange journey into the past, one marked at once by somber reflections and odd humor and featuring characters such as Mapenga, a fellow veteran who lives with his pet lion on a little island in the middle of a lake and is known to cope with his personal demons by refusing to speak for days on end. What results from Fuller's journey is a remarkably unbiased and unsentimental glimpse of men who have killed, mutilated, tortured, and scrambled to survive during wartime and who now must attempt to live with their past and live past their sins. In these men, too, we get a glimpse of 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 is an engrossing and haunting look at war, Africa, and the lines of sanity.

The author writes about her mother growing up in Africa 

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Illinois

A Novel

From bestselling memoirist Alexandra Fuller, a debut novel. Lakota Oglala Sioux Nation, South Dakota. Two Native American cousins, Rick Overlooking Horse and You Choose Watson, though bound by blood and by land, find themselves at odds as they grapple with the implications of their shared heritage. When escalating anger towards the injustices, historical and current, inflicted upon the Lakota people by the federal government leads to tribal divisions and infighting, the cousins go in separate directions: Rick chooses the path of peace; You Choose, violence. Years pass, and as You Choose serves time in prison, Rick finds himself raising twin baby boys, orphaned at birth, in his meadow. As the twins mature from infants to young men, Rick immerses the boys within their ancestry, telling wonderful and terrible tales of how the whole world came to be, and affirming their place in the universe as the result of all who have come before and will come behind. But when You Choose returns to the reservation after three decades behind bars, his anger manifests, forever disrupting the lives of Rick and the boys. A complex tale that spans generations and geography, Quiet Until the Thaw conjures with the implications of an oppressed history, how we are bound not just to immediate family but to all who have come before and will come after us, and, most of all, to the notion that everything was always, and is always, connected. As Fuller writes, "The belief that we can be done with our past is a myth. The past is nudging at us constantly."

Quiet until the Thaw

79f56a6d-88cf-408d-a267-c8bf4b428545-1

The book is in overall good condition. This was a library book previously. All sticker and tags have been removed. Has been stamped. Please see pictures for stamp markings.

Browse by categories

Save this search

Alexandra Fuller

Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness

Alexandra Fuller

Scribbling the Cat

Alexandra Fuller

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

Alexandra Fuller

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

Alexandra Fuller

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

Alexandra Fuller

Leaving Before the Rains Come

Alexandra Fuller

Leaving Before the Rains Come

Alexandra Fuller

Travel Light, Move Fast

Alexandra Fuller

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

Alexandra Fuller

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

Alexandra Fuller

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

Alexandra Fuller

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

Alexandra Fuller

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

Alexandra Fuller

Leaving Before the Rains Come

Alexandra Fuller

Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness

Alexandra Fuller

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

Alexandra Fuller

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

Alexandra Fuller

Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness

Alexandra Fuller

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

Alexandra Fuller

Scribbling the Cat

Alexandra Fuller

Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness

Alexandra Fuller

Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness

Alexandra Fuller

Quiet until the Thaw

Alexandra Fuller

Travel Light, Move Fast