The award-winning memoir of a white boy growing up in Rhodesia as it went through a bloody transition to majority rule

Growing up in Rhodesia in the 1960s, Peter Godwin inhabited a magical and frightening world of leopard-hunting, lepers, witch doctors, snakes and forest fires. As an adolescent, a conscripted boy-soldier caught in the middle of a vicious civil war, and then as an adult who returned to Zimbabwe as a journalist to cover the bloody transition to majority black rule, he discovered a land stalked by death and danger.

'The life of the white boys and girls in colonial Africa has vanished now, but this fine and powerful memoir is a marvellous contribution to its literature'

William Boyd, Sunday Times

'His memoir of those terrible years is a vivdly scary adventure story, as well as a poignant portrait of a bitter moral dilemma...superb'

Graham Lord, Daily Telegraph

'I have no hesitation in saying that Mr Godwin's book is a classic'

Anthony Daniels, Sunday Telegraph

'Remarkable'

Doris Lessing, Observer