You can't rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on, looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nugg….

What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin - when we're dancing with our own skeletons - our w….

One of the things about being raised British in Africa is that you get this double whammy of toughness. The continent in place itself made you quite ….

How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it, or live in it. How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it,….

The rains are rhythmic, coming religiously in the afternoons (after lunch has been eaten but before tea, so that the nights are washed clean-black wi….

There's a point at which writing a book, or a long article, begins to feel like mental labor, and it's too painful to connect in the world in any rea….

I love my mother so much, because I see the whole of her..

But I plucked a new, different, worldly soul for myself -- maybe a soul I found in the spray thrown up by the surge of that distant African river as ….

This is not a full circle. It's life carrying on. It's the next breath we all take. It's the choice we make to get on with it..

I listen mostly to classical music..

Until I read Anne Frank's diary, I had found books a literal escape from what could be the harsh reality around me. After I read the diary, I had a f….

FBI Girl is a gorgeous, sumptuous book. Conlon-McIvor takes a subject (herself and her family) that might have sunk in other hands, beats egg white u….

Once, I discovered the skulls of two impala rams, their horns locked into an irreversible figure-of-eight; the two animals had been trapped in combat….

Surely until all of us own and honor one another's dead, until we have admitted to our murders and forgiven one another and ourselves for what we hav….

People who disagree with His Excellency, the President for Life and 'Chief of Chiefs,' are frequently found to be the victims of car crashes (their b….

I am becoming increasingly difficult to please as a reader, but I adore being surprised by a really wonderful book, written by someone I've never hea….

The land itself, of course, was careless of its name. It still is. You can call it what you like, fight all the wars you want in its name. Change its….

I don't think we have all the words in a single vocabulary to explain what we are or why we are. I don't think we have the range of emotion to fully ….

It's a long day's drive any way you look at it. With a man who has taken your sins - real and imagined - and stitched them onto the sackcloth of his ….

There aren't enough doctors in Africa. Those who choose to become doctors here don't do it for the money or because they want to do good. They do it ….

In ways I don't entirely have the words for an experience, thought or a lesson isn't real for me until I've written down..