Alexandra Fuller has 7 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 5 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 35 ratings. The most-rated is Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight.
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
Summary
Alexandra Fuller tells the idiosyncratic story of her life growing up white in rural Rhodesia as it was becoming Zimbabwe. The daughter of hardworking, yet strikingly unconventional English-bred immigrants, Alexandra arrives in Africa at the tender age of two. She moves through life with a hardy resilience, even as a bloody war approaches. Narrator Lisette Lecat reads this remarkable memoir of a family clinging to a harsh landscape and the dying tenets of colonialism.
©2001 Alexandra Fuller (P)2003 Recorded Books, LLC
Travel Light, Move Fast
Summary
From best-selling author Alexandra Fuller, the utterly original story of her father, Tim Fuller, and a deeply felt tribute to a life well lived Six months before he died in Budapest, Tim Fuller turned to his daughter: "Let me tell you the secret to life right now, in case I suddenly give up the ghost. You wouldn't want me taking all this wisdom with me to the grave." Then he lit his pipe, and stroked his dog Harry's head. Harry put his paw on his lap and they sat there the two of them, one man and his dog, keepers to the secret of life. "Well?" she asked. "Nothing comes to mind quite honestly, Bobo", he said, with some surprise. "Now that I think about it, maybe there isn't a secret to life. What do you think, Harry?" Harry gave Dad a look of utter agreement. He was a very superior dog. "Well, there you have it", Dad said. After her father's sudden death, Alexandra Fuller realizes that if she is going to weather his loss, she will need to become the parts of him she misses most. So begins Travel Light, Move Fast, the unforgettable story of Tim Fuller, a self-exiled British black sheep who moved to Africa to fight in the Rhodesian War before settling as a banana farmer in Zambia. A man who preferred chaos to predictability, to revel in promise rather than wallow in regret, and was more afraid of becoming bored than of getting lost, he taught his daughters to live as if everything needed to happen altogether, all at once - or not at all. Now in the wake of his death, Fuller internalizes his lessons with clear eyes, and celebrates a man who swallowed life whole. A master of time and memory, Fuller moves seamlessly between the days and months following her father's death as she and her mother return to his farm with his ashes and contend with his overwhelming absence, and her childhood spent running after him in southern and central Africa. Writing with reverent irreverence of the rollicking grand misadventures of her mother and father, bursting with pandemonium and tragedy, Fuller takes their insatiable appetite for life to heart. Here, in Fuller's Africa, is a story of joy, resilience, and vitality, from one of our finest writers.
©2019 Alexandra Fuller (P)2019 Recorded Books
Leaving Before the Rains Come
Summary
As her marriage collapses, the author of the international best-seller Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight relearns the fearless ways of her father to find her own true north. Standing in the wreckage of her marriage, in her adopted country America, Alexandra Fuller revisits the continent she loves and finds in her father's harsh, simple, and uncompromising ways the key to her salvation. Casting a fresh eye on her parent's boisterous strengths and debilitating weaknesses, painting a vivid picture of America at the end of decades of false certainty and security, and revealing her Africa, vital and resilient, Leave Before the Rains Come is an astonishment - a memoir of such grace and intelligence, wit, and courage that only Alexandra Fuller could have written it.
©2015 Alexandra Fuller (P)2015 Recorded Books
Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness
Summary
Alexandra Fuller won worldwide attention, popular acclaim, and critical accolades for her memoir of her childhood in Africa, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. This engaging follow-up explores Fuller’s parents’ childhoods and charts the trajectories of their lives through all the British couple’s experiences in war-torn Africa. Fuller braids a multilayered narrative around the perfectly lit, Happy Valley-era Africa of her mother's childhood; the boiled cabbage grimness of her father's English childhood; and the darker, civil war- torn Africa of her own childhood. At its heart, this is the story of Fuller's mother, Nicola. Born on the Scottish Isle of Skye and raised in Kenya, Nicola holds dear the kinds of values most likely to get you hurt or killed in Africa: loyalty to blood, passion for land, and a holy belief in the restorative power of all animals. Fuller interviewed her mother at length and has captured her inimitable voice with remarkable precision. Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is as funny, terrifying, exotic, and unselfconscious as Nicola herself.
©2011 Alexandra Fuller (P)2011 Recorded Books, LLC
Scribbling the Cat
Summary
When Alexandra ("Bo") Fuller was home in Zambia a few years ago, visiting her parents for Christmas, she asked her father about a nearby banana farmer who was known for being a "tough bugger". Her father's response was a warning to steer clear of him; he told Bo: "Curiosity scribbled the cat." Nonetheless, Fuller began her strange friendship with the man she calls K, a white African and veteran of the Rhodesian war. With the same fiercely beautiful prose that won her acclaim for Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Fuller here recounts her friendship with K. K is, seemingly, a man of contradictions: tattooed, battle scarred, and weathered by farm work, he is a lion of a man, feral and bulletproof. Yet he is also a born-again Christian, given to weeping when he recollects his failed romantic life, and more than anything else welling up inside with memories of battle. For his war, like all wars, was a brutal one, marked by racial strife, jungle battles, unimaginable tortures, and the murdering of innocent civilians, and K has blood on his hands. Driven by K's memories, Fuller and K decide to enter the heart of darkness in the most literal way, by traveling from Zambia through Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) and Mozambique to visit the scenes of the war and to meet other veterans. It is a strange journey into the past, one marked at once by somber reflections and odd humor. What results from Fuller's journey is a remarkably unbiased and unsentimental glimpse of men who have killed, mutilated, tortured, and scrambled to survive during wartime and who now must attempt to live with their past and live past their sins. In these men, too, we get a glimpse of life in Africa, a land that besets its creatures with pests, plagues, and natural disasters, making the people there at once more hardened and more vulnerable than elsewhere. Scribbling the Cat is an engrossing and haunting look at war, Africa, and the lines of sanity.
©2004 Alexandra Fuller (P)2004 Recorded Books
The Legend of Colton H. Bryant
Summary
Best-selling author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller presents this heart-rending true story of a simple man whose life is cut short. Colton H. Bryant loves Wyoming and loves life. And Wyoming loves him back - it's got everything he needs. He spends his school days dreaming about where he'll go fishing or how many jackrabbits he might be able to catch that night. And when he's old enough, like his father and his father's father before him, he gets a dangerous job on the oil rig. Colton always said everyone would feel sorry one day for making him waste all that time in school, and Colton was right.
©2008 Alexandra Fuller (P)2008 Recorded Books, LLC
Thalia Book Club: Memoirs of Africa with Alexadra Fuller and Wendy Kann
Summary
Alexandra Fuller (Scribbling the Cat and Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight) and first-time author Wendy Kann (Casting with a Fragile Thread) discuss growing up in colonial Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. They tell many amusing and thoughtful anecdotes and reflect on their childhoods, the Rhodesian Bush War, revisiting a changed Africa as adults, the ties they have to the families and community that raised them in Africa, and the transition to living in the U.S. Fuller begins the evening with a hilarious introduction to her relationship with her mother and a short reading from her memoir, which is followed by Kann explaining why she decided to write a memoir and then reading from her work. This special event was recorded live as part of the Thalia Book Club series at Peter Norton Symphony Space in New York City.
©2008 Symphony Space, Inc. (P)2008 Symphony Space, Inc.