The Africa House

£8.99

Christina Lamb’s “Africa House” is a startling tale of Africa and the Empire, all ensconced within one man’s attempt to make an idyll for himself in the African bush.

Stewart Gore-Brown build himself a feudal paradise in Northern Rhodesia; a sprawling country estate modelled on the finest homes of England, complete with uniformed servants, daily muster parades and rose gardens. He wanted to share it with the love of his life, the beautiful unconventional Ethel Locke King, one of the first women to drive and fly. She, however, was nearly twenty years his senior, married and his aunt. Lorna, the only other woman he had ever cared for, had married another many years earlier. Then he met Lorna's orphaned daughter, so like her mother that he thought he had seen a ghost. It seemed he had found companionship and maybe love - but the Africa house was his dream and it would be a hard one to share.

Assembled from the large volume of diaries and correspondance that was within the empty house, she does an extraordinary job of bringing this forgotten story to life, the text very nearly bewitching the reader as the African bush did of Gore-Brown.