Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)   Out of Africa (Penguin, UK/Vintage, US). This has become something of a cult book, particularly in the wake of the movie. First published in 1937, it describes Blixen's life (Dinesen was a nom de plume) on her Ngong Hills coffee farm between the wars. Read today, it seems to hover uncertainly between contemporary literature and historical document. It's an intense read - lyrical, introspective, sometimes obnoxiously and intricately racist, but worth pursuing and never superficial, unlike the film. Karen Blixen's own Letters from Africa 1914-1931 (trans. Anne Born, Chicago UP, US) gives posthumous insights.

 

Harry Hook   The Kitchen Toto (o/p). By way of an antidote to a surfeit of settlers' yarns, this screenplay tells the story of Mwangi, a Kikuyu houseboy caught up in the early stages of the Mau Mau rebellion. Writer-director Hook's movie is as keen as a country panga and draws masterful performances from a largely unknown cast.

Elspeth Huxley   The Flame Trees of Thika (o/p); The Mottled Lizard (o/p). Based on her own childhood, from a prolific author who also wrote numerous works on colonial history and society, including White Man's Country , a biography of the settlers' doyen, Lord Delamere , and Out in the Midday Sun: My Kenya , both as readable, if also predictable, as any. Her last book, Nine Faces of Kenya (Harvill, UK) is a somewhat dewy-eyed anthology of colonial East African ephemera. More interesting is the collection of her mother's letters, Nellie's Story , which includes some compelling coverage of the Mau Mau years from the pen of a likeably eccentric settler.

Beryl Markham   West with the Night (Penguin, UK/Northpoint, US). Markham made the first east-west solo flight across the Atlantic. This is her only book about her life in the interwar Kenya colony, drawing together adventures, landscapes and contemporary figures. Not great literature, but highly evocative.

Richard Meinertzhagen   Kenya Diary 1902-1906 (o/p). The haunting day-to-day narrative of a young British officer in the protectorate. Meinertzhagen's brutal descriptions of "punitive expeditions" are chillingly matter-of-fact and make the endless tally of his wildlife slaughter pale inoffensively in comparison. As a reminder of the savagery that accompanied the British intrusion, and a stark insight into the complex mind of one of its perpetrators, this is disturbing, highly recommended reading. Good photos, too.

Judith Thurman   Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Story Teller (Penguin, UK/Picador, US). A biography that sets the record straighter and was the source of much of the material for the Out of Africa film.

Errol Trzebinski   The Lives of Beryl Markham (Mandarin, UK/Norton, US). In which, among much else, it is suggested that Markham did not, and could not, have written West with the Night .