In 1971, when Alexandra Fuller was two, her parents abandoned their life in England and returned to what was then Rhodesia, and to the beginning of a civil war. By the time she was eight, the war was at its height. While her father was away for long stretches, fighting on the side of the white government, her mother worked the family farm with a passionate determination fuelled by a ferociously deep love for Africa.

Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is about living through a civil war and coming to a realization that the side you have been fighting for may well be the wrong one. It is a story of optimism and faith: of one family’s quixotic battle against nature and loss, and their unbreakable bond with a continent which came to define, shape, scar and heal them. Alexandra Fuller’s debut is tough and unflinching in wry and sometimes hilarious prose she stares down disaster and looks back with rage and love at an extraordinary family and an extraordinary time.