Alexandra Fuller was born in England in 1969. In 1972, she
moved with her family to a farm in southern Africa. She lived in
Africa until her midtwenties. In 1994, she moved to
Wyoming. Fuller is the author of several memoirs,
including Travel Light, Move Fast, Leaving Before the
Rains Come, and Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight.
“Electrifying . . .Writing in shimmering, musical prose . . . Ms.
Fuller manages the difficult feat of writing about her mother and
father with love and understanding, while at the same time
conveying the terrible human costs of the colonialism they
supported . . . Although Ms. Fuller would move to America with her
husband in 1994, her own love for Africa reverberates
throughout these pages, making the beauty and hazards of that land
searingly real for the reader.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York
Times
“Ten years after publishing Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs
Tonight: An African Childhood, Alexandra (Bobo) Fuller treats
us in this wonderful book to the inside scoop on her glamorous,
tragic, indomitable mother . . . Bobo skillfully weaves together
the story of her romantic, doomed family against the background of
her mother’s remembered childhood.” —The Washington Post
“Another stunner . . . The writer's finesse at handling the element
of time is brilliant, as she interweaves near-present-day
incidents with stories set in the past. Both are equally vivid . .
. With Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness Alexandra
Fuller, master memoirist, brings her readers new pleasure. Her mum
should be pleased.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Fuller's narrative is a love story to Africa and her family.
She plumbs her family story with humor, memory, old photographs and
a no-nonsense attitude toward family foibles, follies and
tragedy. The reader is rewarded with an intimate family story
played out against an extraordinary landscape, told with remarkable
grace and style.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
“[Fuller] conveys the magnetic pull that Africa could exert on
the colonials who had a taste for it, the powerful feeling of
attachment. She does not really explain that feeling—she is a
writer who shows rather than tells—but through incident and
anecdote she makes its effects clear, and its costs.” —The
Wall Street Journal
“[A]n artistic and emotional feat.” —The Boston Globe
“An eccentric, quixotic and downright dangerous tale with full room
for humor, love and more than a few highballs.” —Huffington
Post
“Cocktail Hour [Under the Tree of Forgetfulness] subtly
explores the intersections of personality, history, and landscape
in ways that are continually fresh and thoughtful.” —Charleston
Post and Courier
“Gracefully recounted using family recollections and photos, the
author plumbs the narrative with a humane and clear-eyed gaze—a
lush story, largely lived within a remarkable place and
time.” —Kirkus Reviews
“In this sequel to her 2001 memoir, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs
Tonight, which her unflattered mum calls the ‘Awful Book,’ Duller
gives a warm yet wry account of her British parents’ arduous life
in Africa. . . . With searing honesty and in blazingly vibrant
prose, Fuller re-creates her mother’s glorified Kenyan girlhood and
visits her forever-wild parents at their Zambian banana and fish
farm today. The result is an entirely Awesome Book.” —More
Magazine
“Fuller brings Africa to life, both its natural splendor and the
harsher realities of day-to-day existence, and sheds light on her
parents in all their humanness—not a glaring sort of light, but the
soft equatorial kind she so beautifully describes in this
memoir.” —Bookpage
“Fuller revisits her vibrant, spirited parents, first introduced
in Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (2001), which her
mother referred to as that ‘awful book’. . . . This time around,
Nicola is well aware her daughter is writing another memoir, and
shares some of her memories under the titular Tree of
Forgetfulness, which looms large by the elder Fullers’ house in
Zambia. Fuller’s prose is so beautiful and so evocative that
readers will feel that they, too, are sitting under that tree. A
gorgeous tribute to both her parents and the land they love.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“A sardonic follow-up to her first memoir about growing up in
Rhodesia circa the 1970s, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,
this work traces in wry, poignant fashion the lives of her intrepid
British parents. . . . Fuller achieves another beautifully wrought
memoir.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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