copyright 2001; Random House publishers, New York; hardbound in ebony boards with silver lettering along spine; very good condition with unmarked pages; dust jacket very good.
Description -
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, a memoir of life with Alexandra Fuller and her family on a farm in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe.) After the Rhodesian Bush War ended in 1980, the Fullers moved to Malawi, and then to Zambia. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize in 2002, was a New York Times Notable Book for 2002 and a finalist for The Guardian's First Book Award, an award given to the best regional novel of the year.
Plot -
Alexandra Fuller's book tells the story of her family of white Zimbabwean tenant farmers in the years before and after Independence. These are not the wealthy landowners demonised by the present Zimbabwean government; they struggle to make a living off the land, as well as the usual hazards of the African bush, they fear landmines and attacks by guerrillas crossing the border from Mozambique. During the civil war, their parents join the police reserve.
Bobo and her sister are warned not to come into their parents' bedroom in the night because they sleep with loaded guns. Then at Independence (1980), Bobo and her classmates are stunned to see black pupils far wealthier and more sophisticated than them joining their elite high school. Their farm is seized by the new government and awarded to political cronies under a land distribution programme and they move south to a much harsher ranch, where their diet is based on impala and brackish water from a borehole that is strictly rationed.
From Zimbabwe, the Fullers move to Malawi, where they are closely watched by government agents...