West with the night

Beryl Markham moved to Kenya with her father at the age of four and stayed until her death in 1986. Her incredible autobiography describes the Africa she learnt to love: her childhood surrounded by the tribal people, her tangles - often nearly fatal - with its wild animals and her passions for racehorses and aeroplanes. Markham achieved notoriety and success as a horse trainer when one of her horses won the most prestigious race in Kenya. She turned her hand to aeroplanes with Denys Finch Hatton, the lover of Karen Blixen, as a teacher and became the first woman in Kenya to receive a commercial pilot's licence. Her adventures and courageous career as a bush pilot are recounted in vivid detail here, along with the richness and fascination of life in Kenya in the twenties and thirties.