Top 10 books about Congo

The Daily Telegraph's Middle East correspondent Tim Butcher -- whose first book, Blood River - A Journey To Africa's Broken Heart, uses his expedition across the Congo to tell the region's turbulent history -- named his top 10 books about Congo for the Guardian.

One predictable but deserving book to make the list:

Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (1899)

What Conrad saw on the Congo in 1890 while serving briefly as a steamboat skipper burnt in his soul for eight years until, in a few hectic months, he ran off this most haunting of novellas. Is it a racist attack on the savagery of black Africa? Or, maybe, a lament for the evil that bursts from all of us when our moral compass starts to spin?

Read about a more recent novel to make Butcher's list.

--Marshal Zeringue