Alexandra Fuller – författare

When Alexandra "Bo" Fuller was in Zambia a few years ago visiting her parents, she asked her father about a nearby banana farmer who was known for being a "tough bugger". Her father's response was a warning to steer clear of him: "Curiosity scribbled the cat," he told Bo. Nonetheless, Fuller began her strange friendship with the man she calls K, a white African and veteran of the Rhodesian War. With the same fiercely beautiul prose that won her such acclaim for Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Fuller here recounts her friendship with K.He is, seemingly, a man of contradictions. Tattooed, battle-scarred, and weathered by farm work, K is a lion of a man, feral and bulletproof. Yet he is also a born-again Christian, given to weeping when he recollects his failed romantic life and welling up inside with memories of battle. For his war, like all wars, was a brutal one, marked by racial strife, jungle battles, brutal tortures, and the murdering of innocent civilians. Like all the veterans of the war, K has blood on his hands.Driven by K's memories, Fuller and K decide to enter the heart of darkness in the most literal way, by traveling from Zambia through Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) and Mozambique to visit the scenes of the war and to meet other veterans. What results from Fuller's journey is a remarkably unbiased and unsentimental glimpse at life in Africa, a land that besets its creatures with pests, plagues, and natural disasters, making the people there at once more hardened and more vulnerable than elsewhere.

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.

** PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST 2025 **The story of a mother grieving the sudden loss of her twenty-one-year-old child – from the bestselling memoirist of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight‘Truly extraordinary’ HELEN MACDONALD‘A mesmeric celebration... Will help others surviving loss – surviving life’NEW YORK TIMESIt’s midsummer 2018, and Alexandra Fuller is about to turn fifty, but feels like her life is coming apart. She vows to get herself back on an even keel. And then – suddenly and incomprehensibly – her son Fi, at twenty-one years old, dies in his sleep.No stranger to loss – young siblings, a parent, her home country of Zimbabwe – Alexandra is nonetheless levelled. At the same time, she is painfully aware that she cannot succumb and abandon her two surviving daughters. From a sheep waggon in the mountains of Wyoming to a silent meditation retreat in Alberta, Canada, she embarks on a journey up and down the spine of the Rocky Mountains, trying to find out how to grieve herself whole.‘For anyone who’s ever loved and lost, or ever will; in short, a book for us all’ OPRAH DAILY‘A profound and gripping memoir’ SUNDAY TIMES* A BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST AND TIME *

When Alexandra 'Bo' Fuller returns to her parents' farm in Zambia, she meets their charismatic neighbour, 'K', a hauntingly beautiful creature with a violent talent for survival.

The sequel to the bestselling Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs TonightBorn in England and uprooted to southern Africa as a toddler by her parents, Alexandra Fuller experienced a unique upbringing – both coloured with tragedy and joy – against the backdrop of the Rhodesian wars. Following her marriage to American Charlie Ross, she leaves Africa for Wyoming in the United States. This sequel to the bestselling Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight vividly captures the highs, lows and ultimate dissolution of Fuller’s twenty-year marriage and her unbreakable tie to her African past as she searches for explanations for the present and answers for the future.Interlaced with stories from her childhood in Africa, Fuller paints a brilliant picture of an expatriate’s love for her homeland, a daughter’s acceptance of her father and the moving journey of her marriage and divorce. Poignant, candid and wistfully humorous, Leaving Before the Rains Come will resonate with anyone who has ever fallen out of love – with a person, idea or a place – and into self-acceptance and the belief that only we can save ourselves.‘Remarkable, beautifully written and fantastically entertaining… a compulsive read’ Observer

The story of a mother grieving the sudden loss of her twenty-one-year-old child - from the bestselling memoirist of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight** Pulitzer Prize Finalist 2025 in Memoir/Autobiography **'Truly extraordinary' HELEN MACDONALD‘A profound and gripping memoir about surviving unexpected, devastating loss’ SUNDAY TIMES‘A mesmeric celebration... Will help others surviving loss — surviving life' NEW YORK TIMESIt’s midsummer in Wyoming and Alexandra Fuller is barely hanging on. Grieving her father and pining for her home country of Zimbabwe, reeling from a midlife breakup, freshly sober and piecing her way uncertainly through a volatile new relationship with a younger woman, Alexandra vows to get herself back on even keel.And then – suddenly and incomprehensibly – her son Fi, at twenty-one years old, dies in his sleep.From a sheep wagon deep in the mountains of Wyoming to a grief sanctuary in New Mexico to a silent meditation retreat in Alberta, Canada, Alexandra journeys up and down the spine of the Rocky Mountains in an attempt to find how to grieve herself whole. By turns disarming, devastating and unexpectedly, blessedly funny, Alexandra recounts the wild medicine of painstakingly grieving a child in a culture that has no instructions for it.

When her father becomes gravely ill on holiday in Budapest, Alexandra Fuller rushes to join her mother at his bedside, where they see out his last days together and then carry his ashes back to their farm in Zambia.A master of time and memory, Fuller moves seamlessly between the days and months following her father's death. She contends with his overwhelming absence, and her memories of a childhood spent running after him in southern and central Africa. She then faces seemingly irreparable family fallout, new love found and lost, and, eventually, further unimaginable bereavement. Bursting with pandemonium and tragedy, here is a story of joy, resilience and vitality, from a writer at the very height of her powers.