Justin Cartwright   Masai Dreaming (Picador, UK/Random House, US). A compelling novel juxtaposing a film-maker's vision of Maasai-land with the barbarities of the Holocaust, linked by the tapes of a Jewish anthropologist.

 

Jeremy Gavron   Moon (Penguin, UK). Vivid short novel about a white boy growing up on a farm during the Emergency.

Martha Gellhorn   The Weather in Africa (Eland, UK). Three absorbing novellas, each dealing with aspects of the Europe-Africa relationship, set on the slopes of Kilimanjaro, in the "White Highlands" of Kenya and on the tourist coast north of Mombasa.

David Lambkin   The Hanging Tree (Penguin, UK/Counterpoint, US). A human-nature-through-the-ages saga which makes a good yarn - in fact, several yarns.

John Le Carré   The Constant Gardener (Hodder Headline, UK). The spymaster turns his hand to a whodunnit, in which a campaigner against the misdeeds of Western drug companies in Kenya is raped and murdered. Her husband, a British diplomat in Nairobi, fails to believe official explanations and starts his own investigation. Effectively banned in Kenya, the novel is brilliantly crafted, though not always convincing in its portrayal of today's expat society.

Paul Meyer   Herdsboy (Northwest Publishing, US). American tourist "finds herself captive of a native tribe". A pacey first novel, set in Samburu-land, that overcomes the jacket description.

Maria Thomas   Come to Africa and Save Your Marriage (Serpent's Tail, UK/Soho Press, US). Most of these tales are set in Kenya or Tanzania. Thomas's characters are solid, but the stories leave a wearying aftertaste as if there were nothing positive to be had from the expatriate experience. Her first novel, Antonia Saw the Oryx First , is painfully detailed - a good antidote to Out of Africa .

Barbara Wood   Green City in the Sun (Pan, UK) A white settler family come into conflict with a Kikuyu medicine woman in one of the few credible novels about the realities of colonial Kenya by a mzungu writer.