This idyll is shattered by the First World War, and then by a drought which brings financial ruin to her father. She describes her wild childhood, hunting with a local tribe and getting mauled by a lion, then her adolescence when she helped her father train racehorses. It’s an unusual combination, and a brilliant one.īeryl Markham grew up in Kenya – although back then it was British East Africa – at the beginning of the twentieth century. Here are many escapades of breath-holding, fist-clenching excitement, but written about in thoughtful, lyrical prose. This post is about a book set somewhere even hotter, and I hope it will chase away the last of the winter blues.īeryl Markham’s extraordinary memoir West with the Night is a peculiarly feminine tale of African adventure and derring-do. We live in the wrong country, I tell you. Hailed as “one of the greatest adventure books of all time” by Newsweek and “the sort of book that makes you think human beings can do anything” by the New York Times, West with the Night remains a powerful testament to one of the iconic lives of the twentieth century.Apologies for not writing a post last week – I was away on hols, in beautiful Cordoba, finding it hilarious that the husband and I were getting a little sunburnt while all the Spanish were shivering in their winter coats.

Markham’s successes and her failures–and her deep, lifelong love of the “soul of Africa”–are all told here with wrenching honesty and agile wit. In 1936, she accepted the ultimate challenge: to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean from east to west, a feat that fellow female aviator Amelia Earhart had completed in reverse just a few years before. She trained as a bush pilot at a time when most Africans had never seen a plane. A rebel from a young age, the British-born Markham was raised in Kenya’s unforgiving farmlands.

A contemporary of Karen Blixen (better known as Isak Dinesen, the author of Out of Africa), Markham left an enduring memoir that soars with astounding candor and shimmering insights. Not only did she set records and break barriers as a pilot, she shattered societal expectations, threw herself into torrid love affairs, survived desperate crash landings–and chronicled everything. Beryl Markham’s life story is a true epic.

The classic memoir of Africa, aviation, and adventure–the inspiration for Paula McLain’s Circling the Sun and “a bloody wonderful book” (Ernest Hemingway). You can read this before West with the Night PDF EPUB full Download at the bottom.

Here is a quick description and cover image of book West with the Night written by Beryl Markham which was published in 1942–. Brief Summary of Book: West with the Night by Beryl Markham

West with the night