At sea with oneself

The Voyage Home is the third book I’ve read about Africa recently. Like the others it captures and distills the unique texture and smell of Africa, the touching sense of being a decade or two out of time. Both The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith, so wonderfully tender and funny, and Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller — civil-war-torn Rhodesia seen through the eyes of the author’s childhood self — brilliantly evoked early chapters of my own life in that part of the world.

I haven’t lived in Nigeria but I was still transported back five decades by Jane Rogers’s new novel — one more than the period she is writing about for part of the story.

The book is two stories intertwined by a father-daughter relationship. Anne, in her late thirties, is travelling back to England by container ship having just buried her missionary father in his beloved Nigeria.