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Daunt Books Children's Short Story Competition 2013

Africa

• North Africa
• West Africa
• East Africa
• Central Africa
• Southern Africa

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  A Good Man in Africa by William Boyd

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  Misanthropic, over-sexed hero Morgan Leafy is the first secretary of the British High Commission in an imaginary African country. He is insecure, hopeless, laughable and highly unsuccessful. A very funny black comedy about a surburban middle manager which takes a dim view of colonial intervention in Africa.

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  Cape Town, Winelands & the Garden Route by Time Out

  Price: £12.99    Add to Basket

  One of the best city guides, Time Out specialise in restaurant listings, activities and night life.

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  Green Hills of Africa by Ernest Hemingway

  Price: £7.99    Add to Basket

  In typically sinewy prose Hemingway describes a month spent on safari in East Africa in 1933.

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  This House Has Fallen: Nigeria in Crisis by Karl Maier

  Price: £14.99    Add to Basket

  An authoritative, well-researched portrait of Nigeria, its post-colonial history and its potential future. Karl Maier mixes history with travel accounts and interviews.

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  Cairo Pocket Guide by Berlitz

  Price: £5.99    Add to Basket

  A slim, pocket-sized guide to the essentials of Cairo for the traveller on any budget. Includes a brief history, the sights arranged by region with accommodation and food in the back. Brief but useful.

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  Kenya by Insight

  Price: £16.99    Add to Basket

  By far the best looking of the Kenyan guides, this lavish guidebook is packed with full-page photographs. Arranged by themes rather than location, for example, history, animals and the safari experience – can be frustrating as the hotel and restaurant listings are bulked together at the back rather than listed by area.

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  The Chains of Heaven by Philip Marsden

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  The best modern account of travels in Ethiopia, well written and particularly good at weaving in the history. Marsden really knows the country; his first book told of his travels here in the Menghistu years and his latest, The Barefoot Emperor, is a highly recommended history of the Emperor Tewodros and his stand at Mekdala.

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  We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families by Philip Gourevitch

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  Philip Gourevitch, journalist and editor of the Paris Review, took the title of this book from a note that was sent from a persecuted Tutsi pastor to his Church president. This collection of real-life stories from survivors of the Rwandan genocide is as human, heartbreaking and intricately researched. Highly recommended.

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  Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller

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  This is the memoir of Alexandra Fuller, a young girl growing up in an extraordinary family in violent, 1970s Rhodesia. Steeped in a passion for Africa and told with courage, honesty and humour, it is highly recommended.

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  The Africa House by Christina Lamb

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  Pieced together from diaries and letters written in the early 20th century, Christina Lamb narrates the story of Stewart Gore-Browne, a man who tried to build the perfect English estate on the edge of a Zambian lake. From whimsical ambitions to his unconventional love life, Lamb has brought her subject and his curious story to life.

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  The Outsider by Albert Camus

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  This existential fable is the story of Meursault, the young murderer of an Arabic man in Algiers, awaiting his trial and execution. It is not this violent act however, that perplexes and horrifies society, but his total lack of feeling: he shows absolutely no remorse for his action or grief at the death of his mother. A thought-provoking, controversial novel deserving of its cult status.

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  The Famished Road by Ben Okri

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  Ben Okri's Booker prize-winning novel, The Famished Road, tells the story of Azaro, a spirit child who has chosen to stay in real world rather than return to the 'heaven' where he belongs. The real world is a small Nigerian village facing disease, hunger and violence. Refreshing and beautifully written, this wonderful novel tight rope walks the line between poetry and prose.

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  The Constant Gardener by John le Carre

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  Fuelled by the tragic murder of his wife Tessa, a British bureaucrat begins to explore the murky world of greed and corruption in contemporary Nairobi. Both a moving, posthumous love story and nail-biting thriller.

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  The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut

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  This is the story of two doctors and an unlikely friendship which develops between them when they are forced to share a room at a rural hospital. Frank represents the old South Africa, middle-aged, underachieving and cynical. Laurence, is post-apartheid South Africa, young, idealistic and energetic. Original, hallucinatory fiction that should have won Galgut the Booker in 2003.

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  Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton

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  It is 1950s South Africa and the Reverend Stephen Kumalo sets out on a journey from his rural village to trace his sister in Johannesburg. A heartbreaking, poetic lament, for Stephen's journey is more like Dante's descent into the nine circles of hell; this is an informative, tragic novel about the inequalities and violence of apartheid.

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  The Harmless People by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

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  The Harmless People is a fascinating anthropological study by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas who, in the 1950s, was one of the first white people to spend time with the Kalahari bushmen. Thomas made later trips during the 1980s to update her work and to watch with horror the costs of inevitable industrialisation.

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  The Book of Chameleons by Jose Eduardo Agualusa

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  Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2007, Agualusa's whimsical, poignant novel is about a man who can rebuild your past complete with new family tree and new memories. It is, however, written from the point of view of a gecko. If you enjoy the poetry and magic of Latin American fiction you will enjoy this.

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  Napoleon in Egypt by Paul Strathern

  Price: £11.99    Add to Basket

  In 1798, aged just 28, Napoleon attacked Egypt with 335 ships and 40,000 men intending to follow the footsteps of Alexander the Great. His plan failed; yet the findings of the 150 scientists, mathematicians, artists and writers he took with him would form the beginnings of Egyptology. A fascinating and readable historical account of Napoleon's Egyptian odyssey.

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  What is the What by Dave Eggers

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  This is the biography of Valentino Achek Deng, a Sudanese lost boy, told to and written by the excellent Dave Eggers. Deng was one of thousands of children forced to flee the Civil War in Sudan and trek hundreds of miles to Kenyan refugee camps avoiding wild animals, the armed Janjaweed and military air strikes. Beautifully told, utterly shocking and absolutely necessary reading. Highly recommended.

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  The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer

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  Shortlisted as one of the best of forty years of the Booker prize, Nadine Gordimer's powerful novel is about a smug, white, financier who seems to have it all. Yet, Mehring must watch as his life and the farm, which is a symbol of South Africa as a whole, fall apart around him. This is a novel of irony and contradiction, a poetic tour de force which leaves the book free for any interpretation.

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  The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski

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  Kapuscinski spent over 40 years travelling around the African continent as a Polish war correspondent. Collected here are his adventures, from dangerous travelling tales to his unique insights into the history and politics of modern Africa. Brilliant, informative and highly enjoyable.

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  Pax Britannica by Jan Morris

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  The second volume of The Pax Britannica Trilogy about the rise and fall of the British Empire in India. Continuing where Pax Britannica left off, Jan Morris focuses on the empire at its zenith.

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  Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz

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  The first novel in Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy introduces shopkeeper Ahmad Al Jawad and his family. Set in the 1920s Mahfouz uses their story to explore the rising political and cultural unrest in his beloved country. This exquisitely written novel is the fate of a nation played out in a deeply human context.

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  Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

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  One of the grand masters of post-colonial, African fiction, Chinua Achebe's novel tells the story of Okonkwo, the 'strong man' of a small Nigerian village. The story concerns Okonkwo's fall from stature within the tribe and the cultural destruction of his village by European missionaries. Wole Soyinka described Achebe's work as, 'The first novel in English which spoke from the interior of an African character, rather than portraying the African as exotic, as the white man would see him.'

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  Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  Price: £7.99    Add to Basket

  A lucid and very powerful autobiography. Ali describes her journey from Somalia to the US, exploring the global rise of radicalised Muslim groups and her own relationship with Islam.