Alexandra Fuller

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Florida

"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

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Maine

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

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An African Childhood

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

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

Maryland

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

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Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Vermont

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.

South Dakota

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

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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

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.

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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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.

Illinois

New Jersey

The author writes about her mother growing up in Africa 

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Alexandra Fuller

Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness

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

Leaving Before the Rains Come

Alexandra Fuller

Leaving Before the Rains Come

Alexandra Fuller

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

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

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

The Legend of Colton H. Bryant

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

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

Alexandra Fuller

Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness

Alexandra Fuller

Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness

Alexandra Fuller

Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness