Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight (4, 2015) | Alexandra Fuller

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 the civil war in 1970s Rhodesia (renamed Zimbabwe at independence), Alexandra Fuller remembers her childhood in this extraordinary and devastating memoir. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight is the astonishingly clear-eyed story of a family living through a civil war, of a quixotic battle with nature and loss. It is the story of the end of empire, of prejudice and privilege, too much drink and not many rules, violence and shattering grief. 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.