Alexandra Fuller

A great addition to Fuller’s other books.

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Minnesota

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

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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. 

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

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Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

An African Childhood

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

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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. 

Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness

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

Maryland

Connecticut

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. 

South Dakota

New, never read. Comes from a smoke free, pet friendly home.

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Illinois

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

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Idaho

New York

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.

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.

California

Traces the short life of a Wyoming native whose youth was marked by his open enjoyment of living and simple philosophies that eventually gave way to marriage and an early death from an oil rig accident.

The Legend of Colton H. Bryant

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New Hampshire

New Jersey

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Florida

The author writes about her mother growing up in Africa 

Alabama

A Memoir of My Son

From the award-winning New York Times-bestsellingauthor of Don't Let's Go To The Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller, comes acareer defining memoir about grieving the sudden loss of hertwenty-one-year-old child "Fair to say,I was in a ribald state the summer before my fiftieth birthday." And so beginsAlexandra Fuller's open, vivid new memoir, Fi. It's midsummer in Wyoming andAlexandra is barely hanging on. Grieving her father and pining for her homecountry of Zimbabwe, reeling from a midlife breakup, freshly sober and piecingher way uncertainly through a volatile new relationship with a younger woman,Alexandra vows to get herself back on even keel. Andthen--suddenly and incomprehensibly--her son Fi, at twenty-one years old, dies inhis sleep. No strangerto loss--young siblings, a parent, a home country-- Alexandra is nonethelessleveled. At the same time, she is painfully aware that she cannot succumb andabandon her two surviving daughters as her mother before her had done. From asheep wagon deep in the mountains of Wyoming to a grief sanctuary in New Mexicoto a silent meditation retreat in Alberta, Canada, Alexandra journeys up anddown the spine of the Rocky Mountains in an attempt to find how to grieveherself whole. There is no answer, and there are countless answers--in poetry,in rituals and routines, in nature and in the indigenous wisdom she absorbed asa child in Zimbabwe. By turns disarming, devastating and unexpectedly,blessedly funny, Alexandra recounts the wild medicine of painstakingly grievinga child in a culture that has no instructions for it.

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Leaving Before the Rains Come

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Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

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Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness

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

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

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Scribbling the Cat

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The Legend of Colton H. Bryant

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Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

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Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness

Alexandra Fuller

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

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Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness

Alexandra Fuller

Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness

Alexandra Fuller

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

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Fi

Alexandra Fuller

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

Alexandra Fuller

Scribbling the Cat

Alexandra Fuller

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight