Leopard at the Door
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
*The perfect summer read, the novel that Dinah Jefferies has called 'A simply stunning novel that will stay with me: magnificent'*
Stepping off the boat in Mombasa, eighteen-year-old Rachel Fullsmith stands on Kenyan soil for the first time in six years. She has come home.
But when Rachel reaches the family farm at the end of the dusty Rift Valley road, she finds so much has changed. Her beloved father has moved his new partner and her son into the family home. She hears menacing rumours of Mau Mau violence, and witnesses cruel reprisals by British soldiers. Even Michael, the handsome Kikuyu boy from her childhood, has started to look at her differently.
Isolated and conflicted, Rachel fears for her future. But when home is no longer a place of safety and belonging, where do you go, and who do you turn to?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McVeigh (The Fever Tree) explores the beauty of Kenya's culture and landscape while simultaneously keeping the tension of impending conflict immediate and pressing in this captivating and thought-provoking story. When 18-year-old Rachel returns to Kenya during the 1950s, she expects to find her home unchanged. After her mother's death, she spent six years in an English boarding school, dreaming of the peaceful African plains; however, the Kenya she returns to is a place of great political turmoil. The society of the Mau Mau want to take back their land from the white settlers with methods that are growing increasingly violent. Rachel feels the friction at home as well, with her father's new English girlfriend running the household under tight control by ensuring the Kenyan servants fear her. Unwilling to succumb to prejudice, Rachel must face constant disapproval for the time she spends in the servants' quarters. Her only confidant is her former tutor, a Kenyan man named Michael, who now works as a mechanic on the farm. McVeigh's beautiful prose and harrowing plot will quickly absorb readers, particularly those interested in 1950s Africa, by sensitively approaching themes of race, cultural evolution, and the humanness that unites us all.)
