Darkest England

Nineteenth-century British explorers are lampooned in this reverse travelogue by South African novelist Christopher Hope. A contemporary South African Bushman, David Mungo Booi, chronicles his exploration of the wilds of England en route to meet the queen. Wanting to collect on a promise made by the queen's great-great-grandmother to protect his people, David encounters the worst of British society upon entering the pastoral country: racist customs officials who imprison him, a picturesque town whose residents are bent on lynching him, and a big-game hunter who wants to add him to his private reserve of African "endangered specimens." Only in the end does he find compassion, and in the strangest of places.