The Flame Trees Of Thika : Memories of an African Childhood

Author: Elspeth Huxley

Autobiography: general

Published on 3 April 2014 by Vintage Publishing (Vintage Classics) in the United Kingdom.

Paperback | 288 pages
193 x 181 x 19mm | 210g

When Elspeth Huxley’s pioneer father buys a remote plot of land in Kenya, the family sets off to discover their new home: five hundred acres of Kenyan scrubland, infested with ticks and white ants, and quavering with heat. What they lack in know-how they make up for in determination: building a grass house, employing local Kikuyu tribe members and painstakingly transforming their patch of wilderness into a working farm. Huxley’s unforgettable childhood memoir is a sensitive account of settler life at the turn of the twentieth century and a love song to the harshness and beauty of East Africa.