"White Sunrise" by John Newton

This sage-style novel is mostly set in East Africa starting in 1902 and continuing past 1920, centring on the war between the British and German settlers. Narrated in the past tense (sometimes slipping into present tense for internal monologue) and 3rd person limited from the perspectives of Adam, Eva, Christy and Kristina. among others, it's a long story which shifts between genres. It starts as an apparently faithful and detailed exposition of the development of a farm from scratch reminded me of A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale, (although farming all alone in Canada and managing a team of Africans to farm for you in Africa are surely very different experiences). But it then metamorphises into a tale about multiple adulteries, after which it becomes about war - I was reminded of William Boyd's An Ice Cream War (written from the British perspective) which was shortlisted for the 1982 Booker Prize and Afterlives (from the African perspective) by 2021 Nobel Laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah. It then turns into a spy thriller before slipping into the brothel fiction genre. 

Lots happened but I was bored well before the end. For me, a long book has to have some great characters to keep me interested and White Sunrise, being plot-driven, never took sufficient time to develop the characterisation of its cast sufficiently for me to care about any of them or to believe in the reversals within their character arcs. Adam is a good man, Eva and very temptable woman, Kristina the prostitute with a heart of gold (well, money) and Christy the ultimate pantomime villain, a sort of portmanteau of everything nasty, not just a rapist but also a coward. (I did wonder whether there was a metaphorical significance in the names Adam, Eve and Christy but I couldn't decide on the theology intended).

It is problematic to write a book about colonisation without considering whether it is racist. There are certainly comments made by some of the characters which seem to imply that the colonisation project is a 'Good Thing' bringing civilisation to benighted natives:

• “They’re [the indigenous Masai] from the Stone Age and we’re from the future....” (Ch 2)
• “Being good Christians we’ll probably push the blacks into reservations and make them work for all the European settlers Eliot plans to bring in. In no time at all we’ll have the place all sewn up - just like America.” (Ch 4)
• “‘What about land for Africans?’ ‘We’re putting them in locations to the east of town. Out of the way but in easy reach as labour. Brilliant arrangement, don’t you think?” (Ch 5)
• “We settlers must cooperate to build a business and political base and make the British Government realise this is a white man’s country - our country.” (Ch 16)
• “The Government plans to transfer the northern Masai down off the Laikipia Plateau and free more land for white settlers. We’ll reunite the tribe in a big reserve on the Mara plain. Been planning it for years. The Masai are not stupid. They know Laikipia is good cattle land. Last year they took us to court. Who would have thought it? Bloody people may still live in the Stone Age but they’re sharp enough to hire lawyers and take an injunction against the Government to stop the move.” (Ch 17)
• "The sun is rising from the west. A lot more Europeans are on the way to join us. Good British stock. ... Soon we'll have the whole area booming with farms and industry and towns." (Ch 57)

These remarks could be justified on the basis that they are made by racist characters and that they are being used by the author to illustrate the immorality of the colonial project. But there are also moments when the racism seemed to extend to the author, starting with the title (White Sunrise) and a comment in chapter one in which the white protagonist is travelling with a huge retinue of Africans who are carrying for him, labouring for him, serving him and protecting him comes across some other white people and remarks "Good to have company for breakfast. I found it damned lonely out here on my own”. Fundamentally the Africans, even the heroes such as Musa, are there as supporting characters, rather than considered as proper people. It made me wonder whether the author believes that some genes are superior to others. Much later in the book, I found evidence suggesting this might be the case. When tracking down the ancestry of one of the characters. it seemed important that he isn’t low-born but rather the illegitimate son of an aristocrat, as if intelligence and physical prowess are reserved for those with special DNA, a position adopted by eugenicists which underpins racism. This left an umpleasant taste in my mouth.

It was also difficult to read in the literal sense because of the multiple glitches in layout and typography in my kindle version. I found it very distracting to be continually required to decipher words. At one point, chapter 16 seems to be (mostly) repeated which was confusing. These factors certainly didn't help my enjoyment.

But in the other hand, if you enjoy stories with plenty of action, lots of sex and a fair bit of death, war and hunting and excitement, with Churchill and Bela Kun thrown in, then this might be the book for you.

Selected quotes:

• “As the column settled into stride between brilliant white mountain to the west and brilliant gold sun to the east, her mood changed and she almost wept at a barely remembered dream of death.” (Ch 2)
• “We had bubonic plague in the bazaars. Bloody rats everywhere. Only solution was to burn the place. So we did. Hope it works.” (Ch 5)
• “‘You don’t believe in God’ ‘I do when He gets something right.’ said Musa.” (Ch 5)
• “Death nearly got me three times. Will it try again? No one ever talks about four times lucky....” (Ch 29)

March 2026

Originally published in 2013

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Sanders of the River" by Edgar Wallace

Not so much a novel, more a collection of tales about a District Commissioner in Africa during colonial rule. 

Fundamentally racist, it portrays the Africans as childish, ignorant and bellicose who must be ruled using corporal and capital punishment; white people who seek to educate the Africans and who see them as having rights are frequently murdered; Sanders keeps order with soldiers and machine guns. The implicit values espoused in this book are horrid and make it difficult to read.

The author, Edgar Wallace, was a hugely prolific and hugely popular writer of thrillers from 1905 until his death in 1932; Sanders of the Rivers (written 1911) inspired a series of works. His other popular works were the Four Just Men series; he also wrote the original screenplay for King Kong. His immense popularity suggests that he tapped into the zeitgeist of the time. It is instructive to read books such as this if only to understand the values of popular culture at the time and to be thankful at how far we have come from that in only just over one hundred years, even if we have not yet progressed far enough.

I also found it interesting that Wallace adopted short sentences, short paragraphs and a very direct tell-don't-show (past tense third person) style.

Wallace spent some time in South Africa as a soldier and journalist, so presumably he had some background on which to base his stories. His books are mostly out of print in the UK, presumably because they are too racist to publish, but wikipedia says that Wallace still has a readership in Germany.

Selected quotes:

•  "Gold-leaf imposed upon the lead of commerce" (Ch 1)
• "The people hesitated, surging and swaying, as a mob will sway in its uncertainty." (Ch 2)
• "For many years have the Ochori people formed a sort of grim comic relief to the tragedy of African colonization." (Ch 3) There are occasional indications that Wallace is aware the colonialism is an evil system but fundamentally he has espoused and incorporated its basic values: that one man's life is worth more than another's and that this valuation depends upon the colour of his skin. 
• "The Isisi Exploitation Syndicate, Limited, was born between the entree and the sweet" (Ch 4) The word 'exploitation' is at least frank. But the exploiter is a (disguised) Jew and Wallace demonstrates his racism includes anti-semitism.
• "the green path to death" (Ch 4)
• "There had been good crops, and good crops mean idleness, and idleness means mischief." (Ch 5) 
• "Heroes should be tall and handsome, with flashing eyes; Sanders was not so tall, was yellow of face, moreover had grey hair." (Ch 6)
• "You who do not understand how out of good evil may arise must take your spade to some virgin grassland, untouched by the hand of man since the beginning of time. Here is soft, sweet grass, and never a sign of nettle, or rank, evil weed. It is as God made it. Turn the soil with your spade, intent on improving His handiwork, and next season - weeds, nettles, lank creeping things, and coarse-leaved vegetation cover the ground." (Ch 8) He uses this to suggest that missionaries are bad for Africa but by extension it suggests that education is bad for poor people. 
• "He had sown ... the seed of an idea that somebody was responsible for their well-being." (Ch 8) Wow! Wallace was a fascist in so many ways.
• "He was in the despondent mood peculiar to men of action who find life running too smoothly." (Ch 9)
• "The wise goat does not bleat when the priest approaches the herd." (Ch 9)
• "As he walked, you saw the muscles of his back ripple and weave like the muscles of a well-trained thoroughbred." (Ch 12) 
• "A story about Africa must be a mystery story, and your reader of fiction requires that his mystery shall be, in the end, X-rayed so that the bones of it are visible." (Ch 13)
• "'Puck-apuck-puck-apuck-puck' went the stern wheel slowly, and the bows of the 'Zaire' clove the calm waters and left a fan of foam behind." (Ch 13)

June 2022; 159 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Gravel Heart" by Abdulrazak Gurnah

A young boy, Salim the narrator, grows up in Zanzibar with his mother and her brother; his father lives on his own down the road. Then uncle goes to England, gets married and begins to work for the Embassy; Salim goes to live with him to make the most of his opportunities in England. Salim's life is a serious of casual happenings, almost a picaresque, and it is not until his mother dies in Zanzibar that he begins to understand the shameful secrets at the heart of the family.

It begins and ends in Zanzibar; the middle section is in  England. The first line is "My father did not want me." and the central mystery revolves around why the narrator's father left the family home to live by himself. But, perhaps, the psychological narrative explores how the narrator learned to accept the frailties and actions of his parents; this is perhaps the biggest lesson of growing up. So the events that take place in England, where the maturing narrator fails to achieve his potential, and experiences love and heartbreak, despite their seeming randomness, are key to his development.

There is a political narrative as well, which is to do with colonialism. Following the imperialistic British 'protectorate' of the island there was a revolution which led to a socialist government. These events interact strongly with the narrator's family, leading to his grandfather's exile; the subsequent corruption of the revolutionary government also has a huge influence on the family.

It is beautifully written in elegant and elegiac prose. The settings are crystal clear: "These were streets built for the shuffle and slap of human feet." (Ch 1). The characters are vividly real. It has a first person narrator and it is written in the past tense.

Selected quotes:

• "My father did not want me. I came to that knowledge when I was quite young, even before I understood what I was being deprived of and  along time before I could guess the reason for it." (Ch 1; first lines)
• "Fathers, just like everyone else, have to deal with the relentless manner in which life conducts its business." (Ch 1)
• "European colonial officials ... lived in huge old Arab houses by the sea, and marked their ceremonial imperial rituals with white linen uniforms adorned with fantasy medals." (Ch 1)
• "I was fourteen years old then and a person can feel old and wise at that age even when he really had no idea, and what he took for wisdom was only a precocious intuition arrived at without humility." (Ch 2)
• "'That is not a smile, that's a grin,' Uncle Amir said. 'Next time I take a photograph of you, I want you to compose yourself so that your personality comes through, not your teeth'." (Ch 3)
• "What is the point of literature? I think that the person who asks that question will not find my answer convincing anyway." (Ch 4)
• "I did not tell him that my mother was the one who sent me here and that something broke in my father;s life a long time ago and I was the debris of their disordered lives." (Ch 4)
• "I was required to read books that opened up the world for me and made me see how much roomier it was than I had imagined." (Ch 5)
• "In repose after pleasure her face was slack-jawed with satiety." (Ch 5)
• "It seemed that human sorrow was always based on regret and pain in the past." (Ch 5)
• "She carried herself as if she was a beauty and her self-love made her provocative." (Ch 7)
• "It was pointless pedantry, like poetry, a delight in complexity, a relish for detail, a stubborn refusal to forget what was known." (Ch 9)
• "It was a conceit of the time that the existence of anything, a river, a lake, a mountain or a beast, could not be assured unless a European person had seen it and wherever possible named it." (Ch 9)
• "At a certain age you don't understand how long life is." (Ch 10)
• "Some people have a use in the world, even if it is only to swell a crowd and say yeah, and some people don't." (Ch 11; last line) There seems to be a reference to The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock by T S Eliot where the narrator, looking back at the pointlessness of his life, says "I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two,"

January 2020; 261 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Also by Abdulrazak Gonfur, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2021, and reviewed in this blog:

• The Last Gift
• Afterlives

Books by Nobel Laureates reviewed in this blog:

Abdulrazak Gurnah (2021)

Afterlives
The Last Gift
Gravel Heart 

Kazuo Ishiguro (2017)

Klara and the Sun

The Buried Giant

When We Were Orphans

Patrick Modiano (2014)

In the Cafe of Lost Youth

The Black Notebook

Alice Munro (2013)

The View from Castle Rock

Herta Muller (2009)

The Passport

Doris Lessing (2007)

The Golden Notebook
The Fifth Child
The Good Terrorist
Ben, In the World 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1992)

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Saul Bellow (1976)

The Victim

Heinrich Boll (1972)

The Train was on Time

Samuel Beckett (1969)

The Expelled; The Calmative;, The End & First Love

Waiting for Godot

John Steinbeck (1962)

Of Mice and Men

Cannery Row

Albert Camus (1957)

The Plague

The Outsider

The Myth of Sisyphus

The Fall

William Faulkner (1949)

Sanctuary

As I Lay Dying

Andre Gide (1947)

The Immoralist

Strait is the Gate

The Vatican Cellars

Hermann Hesse (1946)

Steppenwolf

Demian

Thomas Mann (1929)

Death in Venice

"Afterlives" by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Afterlives (published 2020) is the latest novel by Abdulrazak Gurnah who on 7th October 2021 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Zanzibar, in Tanzania, Gurnah has lived most of his life in Canterbury, Kent, England. I moved away from Canterbury the day before Gurnah won his Novel Prize! And I never met him. 

It took me a while to get into this book. It is written in a conventional third person past tense with an omniscient narrator and the narrative distance varies from extreme overview shot (there are individual paragraphs which detail years of warfare, as if they are the establishing shot in a film, taken from a long way off) to in head thoughts (for Hamza and Afiya, at least) but it never gets close enough to the thoughts of the characters to be stream of consciousness so the overall effect is a little bit stand-offish. This is particularly the case in the first few chapters and the last chapter which deal mostly with peripheral characters; the core narrative of the love story between Hamza and Afiya is restricted to the centre of the book. There were parts which read like a narrative history. This distant narration reminded me of other African writers such as Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, and No Longer at Ease). 

I think this was why I took a while to enjoy the book; once it arrived at a more conventionally 'western-novel-style' narrative I began to enjoy exploring the character of Hamza and, through him, began to appreciate the complexities of the other characters, Khalifa in particular who is a great grumpy old man with a heart of gold and his shrewish wife Bi Asha. 

In some ways, Afterlives resembled a memoir more than a novel. What, in conventional novel terms, is one to make of the demonic possession of Ilyas, unless it is to provide a motivation for his researches in the final chapter, or to suggest that native African explanations of 'voices in the head' have as much validity as Western-style psychology? 

It was a coincidence that I had read An Ice Cream War by William Boyd less than a month before this book: both of these novels deal with the fighting between the Germans and the British in East Africa during World War One although their perspectives (Afterlives purely African; Ice Cream purely British) are diametrically opposite. 

Another brilliant book about the African experience in the First World War (though this time in the trenches of the Western Front) is At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop.

Selected quotes:

• "‘No, you’re adding too much salt,’ Hamza said in exaggerated disbelief." (C 5)
• "European volunteers who thought killing was an adventure and were happy to be at the service of the great machinery of conquest and empire." (C 5)
• "In his exhaustion he sometimes reached a stage when he was unafraid, without bravado, without posturing, detached from the moment and open to whatever might happen to him." (C 5)
• "The Oberleutnant was furious and the other Germans joined him in his rage at the indiscipline of the carriers, as if they really believed that the ragged troop they beat and despised and overworked owed them loyalty." (C 7)
• "The morning was warming up but not yet hot and the crowds were still good-natured in their jostling and shoving. Carts barged their way through pedestrians, their drivers calling out in warning, bicycle bells tinkled and cyclists snaked a passage through the press of bodies. Two elderly matrons shuffled on unconcernedly and the crowd parted around them as if they were rocks in the middle of a stream." (C 8)
• "The worst mistakes he made in his earlier life in this town had been the result of his fear of humiliation." (C 9)
• "These thoughts filled him with sorrow, which he thought was the inescapable fate of man." (C 9)
• "Their disagreements sometimes ended in an exchange of tiny imperceptible smiles as if they had seen through each other’s performances." (C 9)
• "He puts great faith in the truth, though that sounds more pompous than I meant it to. Perhaps it would be better to say he has faith in frankness, openness, something like that, without noise or show" (C 10)
• "Poor Ilyas, his life was attended with difficulties yet he lived under a kind of illusion that nothing bad could ever happen to him on this earth. The reality was that he was always on the point of stumbling." (C 11)
• "Good fortune is never permanent. You cannot always be sure how long the good moments will last or when they will come again. Life is full of regrets, and you have to recognise the good moments." (C 12)
• "She talked almost constantly while she was with Bi Asha, even ventriloquising some replies to the questions she addressed to her." (C 13)
• "So what we can know for sure, Ilyas told his parents, is that someone loved Uncle Ilyas enough to follow him to certain death in a concentration camp in order to keep him company." (C 15; last lines)

Other books about war reviewed in this blog are here.

October 2021

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Raffles and the Golden Opportunity" by Victoria Glendinning

This is the biography of Thomas Stamford Raffles. the man credited with the transformation of Singapore from a fishing village into a bustling mercantile port and thereby founding the present city-state of Singapore.

His career was one of service to the East India Company in Malacca in what is now Malaysia and, after the Dutch were invaded by the Napoleonic French, he became the Governor in Java. Both his effective invasion of Java and his founding of Singapore happened despite the Company: "His way, which is the way of all impatient innovators, was to do something first and seek approval from the proper authority afterwards." (Introduction) Naturally this got him into trouble. He was censured during his career and the Company took swingeing revenge after Raffles retired.

As always with biographies, there are a host of other notables who cross the path of the subject. Raffles knew:

• Princess Charlotte, the daughter of the Prince Regent who was presumptive heir to the throne before she dies in childbirth;
• Charlotte's husband, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, who was "lodging over a grocer's shop in Marylebone High Street" (C 9) before his marriage and who subsequently was offered the throne of Greece (and turned it sown as being too turbulent) and the throne of the newly independent Belgium (which he accepted) and was uncle to both Queen Victoria and Albert the Prince Consort;
• Sir Humphrey Davy the chemist and discoverer or laughing gas, sodium and potassium, and inventor of the Davy lamp (whose house he later leased);
• John Barrow, whose later work promoting exploration into the Arctic and Africa is memorialised in Barrow's Boys by Fergus Fleming;
• John Hunter, the distinguished surgeon;
• Napoleon in exile in St Helena

As with most non-fiction books I learned something quite out of the way of the main subject. This book taught me that the word 'pukka' originally meant 'baked' and was used to describe the bricks that made the houses of British India and therefore something permanent. (C 2)

Raffles was in Java when Mount Tambora, on an island to the east of Bali, "exploded in the biggest volcanic eruption in recorded history" causing famine in England due to ash clouds blocking the sun in the "summer that never was"; Raffles collected eye-witness reports and sent them to the Royal Society (C 7)

The last few years of his life were marked with tragedy. He lost all but one of his children by his second wife (his first wife had an illegitimate child before she met Raffles but bore him no children), three of them within a devastating six months. When he retired the ship taking him home caught fire and he lost all his papers and a great deal of money and property; he was uninsured. The East India Company not only refused to compensate him and refused to grant him any pension but also charged him for wages paid while he was on leave and fined him for perquisites he had taken; he would have been bankrupted had he not died shortly after returning to England. The last few chapters are very sad to read.

Other great moments:

• "He did not have a magpie mind, picking up bright bits and pieces. He had a mind like a magnet, drawing in what caught his imagination and taking it further." (C 3)
• "The poor people of the Archipelago were like poor people everywhere. Their rules, like rules everywhere, varied between the wise and the moronic, in either case desirous of holding onto power." (C 3)
• "Raffles ... observed drily that the 'safest principle' to be adopted was that 'every colony does or ought to exist for the benefit of the motherland'." (C 6) [I am not sure I should have described that as a 'great' moment but it clearly and succinctly expresses a point of view and shows that Raffles, if flawed from our perspective, was a man of his time.

Although sometimes a little slow and overdetailed for the general reader, this book delivered a good read and a lot of enjoyment. February 2020; 312 pages

"A Pattern of Islands" by Arthur Grimble

A charming memoir by a man who became a cadet colonial officer for the Gilbert and Ellice Islands in early 1914. Pacific Islands, happy fishermen, sun, sea and surf: this is a memoir of a time in paradise. Of course, even paradise has its problems. Grimble's first post is on Ocean Island (now called Banaba Island in the Republic of Kiribati) which had become the centre of the phosphate mining industry; Grimble sees the actions of the nationalised company who mined virtually the entire island as wholly benevolent although there have been lawsuits from subsequently displaced Islanders and Grimble's account is therefore an unaware apologia for colonialism.

However, the tone of the memoir suggests that Grimble himself was a benevolent District Commisioner who became thoroughly enamoured of the islanders and was even adopted into one of their clans. The whole book is gentle and lyrical and the stories told suggest that, for all its faults, paradise was never far away.

But let us not be too cynical. It is clear that Grimble, for all his blindnesses, saw more than others before him had seen. The first paragraph introduces a gently self-mocking theme: “The cult of the great god Jingo was as yet far from dead. Most English households of the day took it for granted that nobody could be always right, or ever quite right, except an Englishman. The Almighty was beyond doubt Anglo-Saxon ... Dominion over palm and pine ... was the heaven-conferred privilege of the Bulldog Breed. Kipling had said so.” Grimble is doing the best he can, and he is probably aware that it is never quite good enough.

He starts as a cadet, which his boss in London defines thus: "A cadet washes bottles for those who are themselves merely junior bottle-washers." (C 1)

There are ghost stories, one involving communication by voices on the wind bearing news that is only afterwards checked and discovered to be correct, the other involving a walk on the road to heaven along which the ghosts walk in which Grimble encounters a traveller who turns out to be a man who has just died. There are stories of the sea: we learn the native way of killing a shark (a bit like the method of a matador) and their way of catching octopuses which involves human bait, a role which Grimble is persuaded to undertake. There is witchcraft (Grimble is cursed and becomes seriuously ill) and warfare (over land rights) and bravery (when a Roman Catholic priest braves lethal ocean currents to canoe to a neighbouring island to adminster Last Rites to a dying colleague). There is a king who shoots islanders from the palm trees because it amuses him to see how they sprawl on the way down and there is a gone-native trader-cum-administrator who knew Robert Louis Stevenson.

Hauntingly beautiful, wise, compassionate and softly humorous. One nice thing about the islanders is that they have many versions of the creation story and recognise that each version belongs to the teller. When Grimble’s wife added antenatal classes to the women’s gaol the number of expectant mothers convicted in the courts rose dramatically. “The ailing expectant mothers, surrounded by constantly renewed draughts of those interested and willing helpers, ailed so luxuriously that it was difficult to get rid of them, even when they ceased altogether to ail.” (C 9)

Selected quotes:

• “Pacific cockroaches eat feet ... the thick skin on the sole is insensitive, and the victim feels nothing until they have gnawed that down to the quick.” (Prologue)
• “The ... kinship that springs from the immutable constancy of man's need to share laughter and friendship, poetry and love in common. A man may travel a long road, and suffer much loneliness, before he makes that discovery. Some, groping along dark byways, never have the good fortune to stumble upon it.” (Prologue)
• “The accountant had to go on sick leave. According to him, the anxiety of having me near his books had a lot to do with his condition.” (C 1)
• “A chief of chiefs ... is recognised by his shape. He is fleshy from head to foot. But his greatest flesh is his middle; when he sits, he is based like a mountain upon his sitting-place; when he stands, he swells out in the middle, before and behind, like a porpoise.” (C 6)
• “Anaesthetics? ... I had six grand men to hold him down. You can't allow too many gymnastics in an operation like that.” (C 9)

November 2019; 245 pages.

Other memoirs reviewed in this blog may be found here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

My parents were members of the Readers Union Book Club. They must have had a great person to choose the books. This is one of the many I have enjoyed and reviewed in this blog. Here is a list:

• Life with Ionides by Margaret Lane: about a man catching snakes in East Africa
• The Golden Isthmus: the history of Panama from its discovery by Europeans
• The Incredible Mile by Harold Elvin: the travelogue of a journey on the Trans Siberian express
• A Pattern of Islands by Arthur Grimble: the memoir of a Colonial Officer on the Gilbert and Ellice Islands
• Invasion 1940 by Peter Fleming: an account of Britain's unpreparedness and preparation for a Nazi invasion
• Bus Stop Symi by William Travis: three years lived on the sometimes less than idyllic Greek island of Symi
• A Memoir of the Bobotes by Joyce Cary: a memoir of time spent in the Balkan Wars (before the First World War)
• The Great Trek by Oliver Ransford: a history of the formation of the Orange Free State and Transvaal by Boer farmers trekking from the Cape Colony