On their barbed-wire fenced farm in a tropical valley in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), young Alexandra “Bobo” Fuller and her sister Van discuss whether the terrorists will come over the border from Mozambique and cut off their lips.  Bobo and Van and their mother and father are, after all, living right in the middle of two civil wars in Rhodesia and Mozambique, and although they have the fence, huge dogs, a mineproofed Land Rover, and many guns, they are white, English, and on the losing side.  This is only a part of Bobo’s remarkable African childhood spent in some of the most inhospitable areas of Africa – from the steamy Burma Valley the family move to a hot, dry isolated cattle ranch, then to a tobacco ranch in poverty-stricken, dictator-controlled Malawi, and finally to Zambia, a country just recovering from a terrible drought.  Her mother relies on alcohol to get her through the days while her father deliberately picks the worst places to live so he won’t have to be near people and has an alarming penchant for casually telling armed officials to go ahead and shoot the family or else let them go.  I started each chapter wondering what fresh hell awaited the family, but despite the chaos, deprivation, ghastly climate and heartbreaking tragedies, Bobo loves “the incongruous, lawless, joyful, violent, upside-down, illogical certainty of Africa” - it is home.

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