Bartle Bull   Safari: A Chronicle of Adventure (Penguin, UK/US). A great, macho slab of a book, jammed with photos. It's grotesque but utterly compelling - even if the cruelty and foolish waste of the hunting era, so recently past, is emotionally wearing.

 

Negley Farson   Behind God's Back (o/p). An American journalist's account of his long overland journey across Africa on the eve of World War II. A lively book if you can stomach the alarming shifts between criticism of the colonial world and participation in its worst prejudices.

Dick Hedges   Tilda's Angel (Book Guild, UK). If you want to know all about the man behind Safari Camp Services and the Turkana Bus, this is for you. Good on what makes Anglo-Kenyans tick.

John Hillaby   Journey to the Jade Sea (o/p). An obvious one to read before a trip to Lake Turkana. Hillaby's account of his walk in the early 1960s is dated and not always informative - an adventure, as he writes, "for the hell of it", with sprinklings of tall stories and descriptions of loony incompetence.

J. Ludwig Krapf   Travel and Missionary Labors in Africa (o/p). The account of the first missionary at Mombasa, and the first European to set eyes on Mount Kenya.

David Lamb   The Africans (Vintage, US). There's really no contest between Lamb, a Los Angeles Times hack, and Marnham (see below) for a contemporary view of the continent. The Africans has been something of a best seller, but Lamb's fly-in, fly-out technique is a muddled, statistical rant, couched in Cold War rhetoric; even when ostensibly uncovering a pearl of wisdom, he can be unpleasantly offensive.

Patrick Marnham   Fantastic Invasion: Dispatches from Africa (o/p). Although written in the 1970s, nothing since has matched this withering and devastatingly sharp collection, which includes several essays on Kenya. An excellent book, which tunnels beneath the mountain of dross written about Africa.

Peter Matthiessen   The Tree Where Man Was Born (Harvill, UK/Petersmith, US). Wanderings and musings of the Zen-thinking polymath in Kenya and northern Tanzania, first published in 1972. Enthralling for its detail on nature, society, culture and prehistory, and beautifully written, this is a gentle, appetizing introduction to the land and its people.

George Monbiot   No Man's Land (o/p). A journey through Kenya and Tanzania, providing a shocking exposé of Maasai dispossession and a major criticism of the wildlife conservation movement.

Dervla Murphy   The Ukimwi Road (Flamingo, UK/Overlook, US). Murphy's bike ride from Kenya to Zimbabwe becomes - for her - a trip through lands lost to AIDS and neo-colonialism.

Shiva Naipaul   North of South (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics, UK/Penguin, US). A fine but caustic account of the late Naipaul's life and travels in Kenya, Tanganyika and Zambia in the 1970s. Always readable and sometimes hilarious, the insights make up for the occasionally angst-ridden social commentary and some passages that widely miss the mark.

Craig Packer   Into Africa (Chicago University Press, UK/US). A professor of ecology, evolution and behaviour, Packer puts it all to good use in day-by-day reflections during an eight-week field trip.

Joyce Poole   Coming of Age with Elephants (Hodder & Stoughton, UK/Hyperion, US). Deeply sympathetic account of studying the social and sexual behaviour of elephants in Amboseli.

Keith B. Richburg   Out of America; a Black Man Confronts Africa (Basic Books, UK/Harcourt Brace, US). Nairobi bureau chief for the Washington Times from 1991-94, Richburg discovered that he was American, not African, and preferred it that way. A rather depressing read - and partial by the nature of its author. Journalists need stories, and that usually means bad news - this is unfortunately likely to stoke the flames of moral relativism.

Rick Ridgeway   The Shadow of Kilimanjaro (Bloomsbury UK/Henry Holt & Co, US). The American adventurer and filmmaker took a walk in 1997 through the bush from Kilimanjaro to Mombasa - mostly through Tsavo West and East, along the Tsavo-Galana River. Robust, readable and full of passionate enthusiasm for the wild country and the wildlife.

Oona Strathern (editor) Traveller's Literary Companion: Africa (o/p). Brief selections of literature from or about virtually every African country, including a good raft of Kenyan pieces.

Louis Taussig   Resource Guide to Travel in Sub-Saharan Africa: Vol 1 East and West Africa (Hans Zell, UK/KG-Saur, US). Extraordinarily detailed country-by-country coverage of every published source of interest to travellers or expatriates, as well as bookstores, libraries, mapping institutes, children's resources and conservation societies, to list just a few.

Wilfred Thesiger   My Kenya Days (o/p). The account of thirty-odd years in northern Kenya by a very strange man indeed - an old Etonian noble savage with no interest in modern Africa, wedded to his own ego and a reactionary, glamour-laden view of his tribal companions.

Joseph Thomson   Through Maasailand: To the central African Lakes and Back (Frank Cass, UK/International Specialized Book Services, US). First published 1885, these two volumes detail Thomson's African journeys of exploration.

Daisy Waugh   A Small Town in Africa (Mandarin, UK). A year in the life of Isiolo.

Evelyn Waugh   A Tourist in Africa (o/p). First published in 1960, Waugh's diary of a short trip to Kenya, Tanganyika and Rhodesia is determinedly arrogant and uninformed, but funny, too - and brief enough to consume at a single sitting.