Travel Light, Move Fast

Alexandra Fuller’s family and all their foibles are well known to readers of her earlier memoirs. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, and Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness  cover her parents’ early years during the fighting in Rhodesia against the nationalist insurgents, and then after much turmoil, finally settling on a banana plantation in Zambia.   Travel Light, Move Fast, is a moving tribute to both parents that covers the final phase of their life together culminating in the unexpected death of her father in Budapest on holiday with wife and daughter.  Throughout their life this couple showed such resilience in facing their upheavals in Africa—tragedies and misfortunes were borne without showing an outward care. And thus the grief borne by mother and daughter is a shared drama of colonial stiff upper lip.  A wonderful tribute to unusual parents by an unusual daughter with her own share of grief and turmoil.  Let’s hope she remembers Dad’s mantra that “it’ll be all right in the end.  And if it’s not all right it’s not the end.”

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