Carry on up the Zambezi

I loved this book so much I was appalled. Why, when bookshops are stacked full of memoirs by authors who can’t write, isn’t Alexandra Fuller heaped up in perilous piles so near the till it’s impossible to evade her? This is like one of the most alluring Svetlana Alexievich testimonies, as if it had wandered out of the USSR and got lost in central Africa by way of a hospital in Budapest. It’s packed with exquisite jokes, quotes and details — such as when a doctor appears and ‘his gauzy green scrubs puffed out in great billows, the surgical-garb equivalent of Princess Di’s wedding dress’.

Fuller started out trying to write novels before putting her own parents down on paper. The first instalment of their lives was the bestseller Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, followed by the also wonderfully titled Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness and Leaving Before the Rains Come.