[Elspeth] Huxley was a child of six when she trekked out with her gallant mother in an ox cart to join her charming but improvident father in the wild Kikuyu country of Kenya. Through her young eyes we become participants in a family's pioneer existence and share their indomitable spirit. The young couple built their house of grass, cleared the virgin land, and began the planting that they hoped would turn their home into a thriving coffee plantation. They came to know and love the world of farm and bush, with its rich abundance of tame and wild life, its hauntingly lovely scenery, its big-game thrills. Beyond that, they grew to an understanding of the vivid, lively and unsophisticated world of the native, with its witchcraft and sudden death, its charms and spirits. They also became an integral part of the small community of settlers who were their neighbors in the all-but-untouched an Edinburgh nurse, married to an absentee elephant poacher; a tough Boer farmer who had walked his way alone from South Africa; the lovely, vivacious Lettice, her stiff ex-cavalry husband, the handsome romantic adventurer - all authentic individuals in their own right, whose private lives spring into high relief in this absorbing and beautiful book.