Bullets, lipstick, sunglasses. Off we go” (p. 29).

From an early age, Alexandra Fuller knew that her mother, “Nicola Fuller of Central Africa, as she has on occasion preferred to introduce herself” (p. 3), wanted to be immortalized in the pages of a book. However, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight—Alexandra’s acclaimed account of growing up in war– torn Africa with a pair of hard–drinking, charismatic parents—wasn’t quite what Nicola had in mind.

Readers around the world were captivated by Fuller’s memoir, but Nicola was mortified, and now refers to it only as that “awful book” (p. 4). Ten years later, Alexandra returns to her mother’s story in Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness. This time, she reaches back to Nicola’s own childhood, reflecting upon what engendered “the kind of stubborn tribal values that you needed if you were bound and determined to be White, and stay White, first during Kenya’s Mau Mau [rebellion] and later during the Rhodesian War” (p. 12).

Born in 1944 to an English father and a Scottish mother, Nicola Huntingford nonetheless “considers herself one million percent Highland Scottish” (p. 15). And as a Scot, Nicola unequivocally embraces her heritage: a fierce sense of loyalty, a love of animals—and a tendency toward madness.

Although she spends her adulthood hopscotching Central Africa, Nicola was raised primarily in Kenya. Before the Mau Mau Uprising drove out most colonials, Nicola’s family enjoyed a genteel—if tipsy—respectability in a “land of such sepia loveliness . . . that it was worth dying for if you were white” (p. 63).

There, Nicola—largely ignored by her parents—grew to be a willful beauty and a passionate horsewoman. Despite being battered and bloodied by difficult horses, Nicola remembers, “I’d dust myself off and get back on again as soon as I could see straight” (p. 59). Her stubborn perseverance would prove to be both her salvation and her downfall, driving her again and again to stake out a home in a continent being steadily reclaimed by its oppressed native populations.

After a failed stint at a London secretarial college, Nicola returns to a Kenya governed by self–rule. She immediately meets and marries Tim Fuller, a recently arrived English émigré. “Beautiful, optimistic, and aware of being the most exciting couple anyone had ever met” (p. 75), the newlyweds embark upon their shared life—blissfully ignorant of the hardships, violence, and unspeakable tragedies that await them.

In Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, Alexandra Fuller brilliantly positions her remarkable family’s personal history within the broader tides of culture and politics. A funny yet harrowing masterpiece, it perfectly complements Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, but also stands alone as a ferociously talented writer’s paean to her mother’s quixotic yet indomitable spirit, her parents’ enduring love, and the beautiful, merciless land that they call home.  

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