Alexandra Fuller: Travel Light, Move Fast, Penguin Press (Penguin Random House USA) 9781984879219, paperback

Ever since a colleague at Penguin USA introduced me to Alexandra Fuller’s “Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness”,  have I been a huge fan of her books.  Her description of growing up with her larger than life parents, Tim and Nicola Fuller in war torn Africa, first in Rhodesia, later in Zambia, spending a free spirited childhood surrounded by wild animals before being sent off to several boarding schools in Africa, are one of the best memoirs I ever read together with “Don’t lets go to the dogs tonight”.

She is witty, brutally honest with herself and her family (no wonder her family call her books these “awful books” and hope she stops writing), her emotions raw when she writes; she made me laugh out loud and also had me crying many times.  “Travel Light, Move Fast” is no exception, it is brilliant. It is a document to her unforgettable character of a father who died suddenly aged 82 during a trip with her mother to Budapest.  The book is homage to his life philosophy, the man himself who was the black sheep of a wealthier English family and his marriage to her mother Nicola who was raised on a farm in Kenya.  Alexandra Fuller  weaves back and forth masterfully  between her days spent  at her dying fathers bed site and memories of him and their family life in Africa, his misadventures and failures,  forever resilient never giving up but just moving on to another place. At times I asked myself how much loss and misery a person can endure and still come out optimistic. Her accounts of what it was like growing up in such circumstance  with her sister Vanessa kept me glued. She loved and adored her father but never overlooked his flaws.  The loss of him becomes surreal when her ailing mother and Bobo, as she is called by her parents, have to fly home to their farm to Zambia with her father’s ashes on their laps.   The second half of the book is called ”The Widows Farm” dealing with her and her mother’s grief trying to carry on as a family on their Zambian farm without her level headed father holding the entire family together. When she returns to Wyoming to her own family, his loss becomes even more unbearable. But nothing prepared me for her rawest grief and shock at the end of the book, tears rolling down my face reading.   

It is one of the finest accounts of a very unusual family, life and love of family I have ever read.  This book will stick with me for a while, I hope she never stops writing.