Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
Alexandra Fuller
2002 Nominee
Guardian First Book Award
01 January 2015
9781447275084Synopsis
With an introduction by author Anne Enright.
Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award, a story of civil war and a family's unbreakable bond.
How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it, or live in it. How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to.
As the daughter of white settlers in war-torn 1970s Rhodesia, Alexandra Fuller remembers a time when a schoolgirl was as likely to carry a shotgun as a satchel. This is her story – of a civil war, of a quixotic battle with nature and loss, and of a family's unbreakable bond with the continent that came to define, scar and heal them.
Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Alexandra Fuller's classic memoir of an African childhood is suffused with laughter and warmth even amid disaster. Unsentimental and unflinching, but always enchanting, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight is the story of an extraordinary family in an extraordinary time.
Like Frank McCourt, Fuller writes with devastating humour and directness about desperate circumstances . . . tender, remarkableDaily Telegraph
A book that deserves to be read for generationsGuardian
Perceptive, generous, political, tragic, funny, stamped through with a passionate love for Africa . . . [Fuller] has a faultless hotline to her six-year-old selfIndependent
