Houses in Africa

"A friend once told me that the difference between the two of us was the fact that I built nests, and she was happy to live out of suitcases?"

With that sentence, Alma Alexander launches the reader into an extraordinary childhood of building nests in places that many of her

readers can only get to visit by reading about them here, between the pages of her book.

Alexander was taken from her quiet, safe corner of old Europe and deposited into an exotic, exhilarating, wonderful new world of Africa. She writes about the places she grew up and the

people she has met during the twenty years she spent in various countries on the African continent with the purest awe and wonder of

the child that she was, and the eye for nuance and detail which was to serve her well later in life in her career as novelist and essayist.

This is a story of learning to live, of coming of age, of discovering new places both in the writer's immediate surroundings and within

herself.

The reader accompanies Alexander on a journey that will take them to Victoria Falls, the national parks of Africa, Cape Town, the

mountains and the savannas and the high desert of central and southern Africa; a journey that features encounters with lion cubs, mongooses, puff adders, chameleons, elephants, baobabs, acacia trees, jacarandas and recalcitrant bougainvillea; a journey that takes the

reader with the author as she encounters and gets to know the people who cross her African path.

Follow Alexander into the place of which she once, before she knew it, wrote, "Here, there be Dragons." You will leave with her at the

conclusion of this autobiographical memoir a little happy, a little sad, and regretful - much like the author herself - to shake the dust

of Africa from your mind's eye.