Thursday, October 27, 2011

Top 10 African memoirs

Alexandra Fuller has written four books of non-fiction.

Her debut book, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, was a New York Times Notable Book for 2002, the 2002 Booksense best non-fiction book, a finalist for the Guardian’s First Book Award and the winner of the 2002 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize.

Her 2004 Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier won the Ulysses Prize for Art of Reportage.

The Legend of Colton H Bryant was a Toronto Globe and Mail Best Non-Fiction Book of 2008.

Her latest book is Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness.

One of Fuller's top ten African memoirs, as told to the Guardian:
This Child Will Be Great by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

A true story of Sirleaf's ascent from ordinary Liberian child to leader that reads as much like an awful whodunnit on a catastrophically awesome scale, as it does like the memoirs of an ambitious and brave woman. This autobiography from the woman who is Africa's first (and, at present count, only) female head of state, is as inspiring as it is page-turning.
Read about another book on Fuller's list.

This Child Will Be Great is on Samantha Herbert's brief reading list on Nobel Prize winners.

See Alexandra Fuller's five best list of books that "brilliantly evoke the modern American West."

--Marshal Zeringue