100 Books Like White Mischief

Published in 2001, The Constant Gardener is my favorite le Carre Novel. A British diplomat in Nairobi, Justin Quayle, is informed his activist wife, Tess has been killed in a remote part of Kenya along with a doctor friend. As Quayle investigates her life (in a similar way to Eric Ambler unfolds Dimitrios’s life), he uncovers her work exposing large pharmaceutical companies’ unethical experiments in the poorest regions of Africa. This leads to her brutal death and cover-up at a diplomatic and political level. It is an exceptional book that makes you rethink how medicine and the industry behind it operates. After the collapse of the USSR, le Carre seemed to struggle with his work, The Constant Gardener though, kick-started another two decades of great writing from him.

A revealing portrait of 80s/90s Africa from a journalist who had covered many of the continent’s trouble spots for major British newspapers. Through his journeys you get to meet a wide range of players from fighters in the bush to aid executives and politicians in executive suites. A fascinating mix of travel writing and political analysis (and yes with some fishing thrown in). 

I adored this fascinating tale of scientists studying chimpanzees in Africa, intertwined with the story of a failing marriage between one of those scientists, Hope Clearwater, and her mathematician husband back in England.

Reading this book, I was engrossed in the interplay between the people and the chimps, the evocations of African and English landscapes, and the subtle way in which the struggle for power within the chimps’ territory is echoed by human conflict in the same country.

If this all sounds rather complicated, William Boyd is one of the best storytellers around, so I was effortlessly carried along by the gorgeous sentences.

A true South African classic. Told from an Afrikaner point of view which is an unusual experience for me as someone with modern liberal sensibilities, this is a grown-up psychological and political thriller about loyalties, conflict, and betrayals set against the shadow of the Angola conflict and the beginning of the end of apartheid.

This story is told in a series of letters exchanged between two former college roommates, one who marries and joins the Peace Corps in Kenya with her husband, the other striking out on her own in New York City. Each writer has a magic in her writing style that is all her own, which would make either of their tales a standalone success, but the “secret sauce” of this book lies in the juxtaposition of their two very different lives. Each writer’s tales of triumph and woe—lifestyles that could not be more polar opposite—play off one another in the most hilarious and tender way. With acerbic wit and disarming candor, this offbeat correspondence is bound to delight even the most jaded Sex-in-the-City-ish Manhattanite’s heart.

This charming book is a bit different from my other selections. Couffer, an Academy Award-nominated cinematographer and director, provides delightful details of the lives of the cats living on the remote island of Lamu off the coast of Kenya.

With a sharp naturalist’s eye and a delightful voice, Couffer engagingly describes the escapades of several rival colonies of cats as they seek to eke out a living among the fisherpeople and town inhabitants. As well as enjoying the book so much that I could barely put it down, I found it thought-provoking as an example of how the earliest cats may have started associating with humans and began their journey to domestication…or at least as domesticated as cats have become.

Mia Kankimäki’s thoughtful travel memoir explores female adventurers of the past, from Karen Blixen of Out of Africa to Yayoi Kusama, an artist who voluntarily lived in a psychiatric hospital for decades. Kankimäki confronts her own personal demons while considering the challenges these mighty women faced as they journeyed into places unknown.

The Women I Think About at Night is part travel essay, part history lesson, and an all-around enjoyable narrative about female adventures who defied cultural norms to build the lives they wanted.

This is the kind of book that all British historians should be trying to write: an honest, factual, detailed account of what British officials actually did in the service of the Empire. There is no scope for imperial nostalgia over this horrifying story of the brutal violence employed by Britain in the 1950s in an effort to hang onto its colony of Kenya in the face of the Mau Mau Rebellion. With concentration camps, collective punishments, and multiple judicial murders, British methods were among the worst. The ideal Christmas present for any Empire supporters among your friends & family.

Feel the force of fifty children’s voices and celebrate how art and story-telling unite young people who live continents apart. At age seven, I discovered libraries and a love of reading and writing, but the idea that a working-class girl from Luton could become an author was as crazy as eating the straw boater with which my birthplace was associated.

Middle-class parents can afford to buy books for their children. Lack of access to books for children without them is a handicap for upward mobility. That is why the Nasio Trust wants to build the first community library in West Kenya, and Cosmic Cats will be the first book in the library to show the children that they belong there. In our imaginations, we are all equal. BBC South recorded the launch, bringing together the two schools.

I love the nuanced descriptions of how the four main characters and their families adapt to the changing seasonal availability of food within their households in Western Kenya.

Having worked and observed farm families in a similar environment just across the border in Uganda, I find the author’s description of the “hungry” season when the crops are in the ground but not yet ready for harvest, spot on.

I find his discussion of the importance of seed and fertilizer availability and distribution policy-relevant, and the work of the NGO involved in making it happen is inspiring.