At the centre of Alexandra Fuller’s first memoir is a terrible, avoidable death for which she, as a child, feels responsible.

These are difficult things to say – get the tone wrong and you will offend almost everyone – but Fuller’s gaze is equally astonishing when she directs it at the bodies of the white people around her.Besides, reading all the books about war, including the Second World War, the Holocaust events, the French Revolution, Africa and Asian wars, we can conclude that nobody should complain since the person standing next to you might have had it much worse (a thought from "Small Island" written by Andrea Levy). There are some very dark episodes (including deaths), and at one point, even the dogs are depressed, and yet the book itself is not depressing. It is told in a chatty and slightly childish and rambling style (she is a child for most of the book), mostly in the present tense. I was completely mesmerized reading this highly compelling memoir of Alexandra Fuller's childhood experiences as a British expat family living in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), during the time of ending colonialism in the 70s-90s. After the central tragedy of the book, Fuller’s mother goes from being a “fun drunk to a crazy sad drunk”, and Fuller feels responsible for that too.

Though it is a diary of an unruly life in an often inhospitable place, it is suffused with Fuller’s endearing ability to find laughter, even when there is little to celebrate. The other reason I really enjoyed this book was the sometimes startlingly candid and dispassionate voice of the narration.That's the individual mystery of talent, a gift with which Alexandra Fuller is richly blessed, and with which she illuminates her extraordinary memoir.

Usually when I choose to re-read a book I feel like I'm wasting time that could be devoted to reading a new book. These children cheer when they hear the “stomach-echoing thump” of a mine exploding in the hills, because it tells them “either an African or a baboon has been wounded or killed”.it is a contained, soggy madness" but then "it starts to get hard for me to know mere Mum's madness ends and the world's madness begins.