Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

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Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

By: Alexandra Fuller

Narrated by: Bianca Amato

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About this listen

Alexandra Fuller won worldwide attention, popular acclaim, and critical accolades for her memoir of her childhood in Africa, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. This engaging follow-up explores Fuller’s parents’ childhoods and charts the trajectories of their lives through all the British couple’s experiences in war-torn Africa.

Fuller braids a multilayered narrative around the perfectly lit, Happy Valley-era Africa of her mother's childhood; the boiled cabbage grimness of her father's English childhood; and the darker, civil war- torn Africa of her own childhood. At its heart, this is the story of Fuller's mother, Nicola. Born on the Scottish Isle of Skye and raised in Kenya, Nicola holds dear the kinds of values most likely to get you hurt or killed in Africa: loyalty to blood, passion for land, and a holy belief in the restorative power of all animals. Fuller interviewed her mother at length and has captured her inimitable voice with remarkable precision. Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is as funny, terrifying, exotic, and unselfconscious as Nicola herself.

Motherhood

Parenting & Families

Relationships

Women

Africa

Funny

War

Heartfelt

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I have read Alexandra Fuller's memoir "Don't Let's go to the Dogs Tonight" so when this book was recommended to me, I decided to give it a try. As I grew up in Africa, I could identify with a lot of the emotional attachment the mother, Nichola, felt about the various countries the family lived in and her determination to stay somewhere on the continent. However, I didn't like the voice of the narrator. I found it hard and business-like and for most of the book not really in keeping with Nichola, who she was representing. Towards the end, I felt her voice fitted Nichola more because of how Nichola had had to toughen up to cope with all the tragedy and hardship she had faced. What I couldn't understand about her, however, was how she always seemed to take the toughest road, the most difficult places in Africa to live, and keep going back for more when one phase came to an end. The book is very well written and I enjoyed the second half more than the first.