The Harvard Square Book Circle

The Harvard Square Book Circle, our in-store book club, will discuss Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood.

In Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller remembers her African childhood with candor and sensitivity. Though it is a diary of an unruly life in an often inhospitable place, it is suffused with Fuller’s endearing ability to find laughter, even when there is little to celebrate. Fuller’s debut is unsentimental and unflinching but always captivating. In wry and sometimes hilarious prose, she stares down disaster and looks back with rage and love at the life of an extraordinary family in an extraordinary time.

"When the author was growing up, in nineteen-seventies Rhodesia, her parents kept loaded guns by the bed. "Don't startle us when we're sleeping," her mother warned her. "We might shoot you." This memoir of a stubborn, down-on-their-luck, often drunk white family making a last stand against African independence reads like a hard ride over unsafe roads: hair-raising, horrific, and thrilling. One moment Fuller's mother is shooting a cobra in the pantry, the next her sister is calmly baking a cake while armed black soldiers surround the house. The author's honesty about her family's racism is exacting—she recounts how they cheered when they heard mines detonate along the border, because that meant Africans might have been killed—and she delivers an intimate portrait of fierce, flawed lives. Her prose bristles with an unappeased love for Africa and its intense physicality (its smell of "black tea, cut tobacco, fresh fire, old sweat, young grass"). This is Fuller's first book, and already she has a distinctive voice, by turns mischievous and openhearted, earthy and soaring." —The New Yorker