Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood - Tapa dura

Stunning childhood memoir - if you like Andrea Ashworth or Barbara Kingsolver you'll love this.In 1972, when Alexandra Fuller was two years old, her parents finally abandoned their English life and returned to what was then Southern Rhodesia, and to the beginning of a civil war. By the time she is eight, the war is in full swing; her parents veer from being determined farmers to being blind drunk whilst the author and her sister, the only survivors of five children, alternately take up target practice and sing Rod Stewart numbers from sunbleached rocks.Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight is about living through a civil war; it's about losing children and losing that war - and realising that the side you have been fighting for may well be the 'wrong' one. Unflinching, beautifully written, and, at times, extremely funny, Alexandra Fuller's book is one of the most honest memoirs of a childhood to be found in contemporary writing.'A classic is born . . . Like Anne Frank's diary,. this work captures the tone of a very young person caught up in her own small world as she witnesses a far larger historical event.'PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Alexandra Fuller was born in England in 1969. She moved to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) with her family when she was two. After that country's war of independence (1980) her family moved first to Malawi and then Zambia. She came to the United States in 1994. Her book Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize in 2002 and a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award. Scribbling the Cat won the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage in 2006.