Search results for ""author alexandra fuller""

Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulnesstells the story of the author's mother, Nicola Fuller. Nicola Fuller and her husband were a glamorous and optimistic couple and East Africa lay before them with the promise of all its perfect light, even as the British Empire in which they both believed waned. They had everything, including two golden children - a girl and a boy. However, life became increasingly difficult and they moved to Rhodesia to work as farm managers. The previous farm manager had committed suicide. His ghost appeared at the foot of their bed and seemed to be trying to warn them of something. Shortly after this, one of their golden children died. Africa was no longer the playground of Nicola's childhood. They returned to England where the author was born before they returned to Rhodesia and to the civil war. The last part of the book sees the Fullers in their old age on a banana and fish farm in the Zambezi Valley. They had built their ramshackle dining room under the Tree of Forgetfulness. In local custom, this tree is the meeting place for villagers determined to resolve disputes. It is in the spirit of this Forgetfulness that Nicola finally forgot - but did not forgive - all her enemies including her daughter and the Apostle, a squatter who has taken up in her bananas with his seven wives and forty-nine children. Funny, tragic, terrifying, exotic and utterly unself-conscious, this is a story of survival and madness, love and war, passion and compassion.

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Alexandra Fuller is the author of four memoirs, including Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight 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 and the New York Times-bestselling Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, two books of non-fiction, and the novel Quiet Until the Thaw. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, National Geographic, Granta, The New York Times, Guardian and Financial Times.

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The sequel to the bestselling Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs TonightBorn in England and uprooted to southern Africa as a toddler by her parents, Alexandra Fuller experienced a unique upbringing – both coloured with tragedy and joy – against the backdrop of the Rhodesian wars. Following her marriage to American Charlie Ross, she leaves Africa for Wyoming in the United States. This sequel to the bestselling Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight vividly captures the highs, lows and ultimate dissolution of Fuller’s twenty-year marriage and her unbreakable tie to her African past as she searches for explanations for the present and answers for the future.Interlaced with stories from her childhood in Africa, Fuller paints a brilliant picture of an expatriate’s love for her homeland, a daughter’s acceptance of her father and the moving journey of her marriage and divorce. Poignant, candid and wistfully humorous, Leaving Before the Rains Come will resonate with anyone who has ever fallen out of love – with a person, idea or a place – and into self-acceptance and the belief that only we can save ourselves.‘Remarkable, beautifully written and fantastically entertaining… a compulsive read’ Observer

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When her father becomes gravely ill on holiday in Budapest, Alexandra Fuller rushes to join her mother at his bedside, where they see out his last days together and then carry his ashes back to their farm in Zambia. A master of time and memory, Fuller moves seamlessly between the days and months following her father's death. She contends with his overwhelming absence, and her memories of a childhood spent running after him in southern and central Africa. She then faces seemingly irreparable family fallout, new love found and lost, and, eventually, further unimaginable bereavement. Bursting with pandemonium and tragedy, here is a story of joy, resilience and vitality, from a writer at the very height of her powers.

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Influential photographer Annie Leibovitz presents her remarkable portraits in this re-issue of her acclaimed and bestselling collection. Including never-before-published photographs, an essay by Alexandra Fuller, and an afterword by Annie Leibovitz Annie Leibovitz: Portraits 2005-2016 is the photographer's follow-up to her two landmark compilations, Annie Leibovitz: Photographs, 1970-1990 and A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005. For this collection, Leibovitz has selected the best and most representative portraits from her work between 2005 and 2016. The pictures document contemporary culture with an artist's eye, wit, and an uncanny ability to personalize even the most recognizable and distinguished figures. There are over 150 subjects in Portraits 2005-2016, including Venus and Serena Williams, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, LeBron James, Sheryl Sandberg, Anna Wintour, Leonard Cohen, Jasper Johns, Caitlyn Jenner, Gloria Steinem, Joan Didion, Barack Obama, and Queen Elizabeth II.

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With an introduction by author Anne Enright.Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award, a story of civil war and a family's unbreakable bond.How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it, or live in it. How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to.As the daughter of white settlers in war-torn 1970s Rhodesia, Alexandra Fuller remembers a time when a schoolgirl was as likely to carry a shotgun as a satchel. This is her story – of a civil war, of a quixotic battle with nature and loss, and of a family's unbreakable bond with the continent that came to define, scar and heal them.Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Alexandra Fuller's classic memoir of an African childhood is suffused with laughter and warmth even amid disaster. Unsentimental and unflinching, but always enchanting, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight is the story of an extraordinary family in an extraordinary time.

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