On the Edge of the Great Rift: Three Novels of Africa

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Penguin Books, 1996 - Fiction - 643 pages
Fong and the Indians: A Chinese immigrant in a ramshackle East African country, Sam Fong is reduced to scraping a living as a grocer. Outnumbered by Africans and outfoxed by Indians, Fong is nevertheless a survivor, and survival in East Africa depends on one thing: making friends with the enemy ... Girls at Play: Miss Poole runs an isolated school for African girls in the Kenyan bush. Her unmarried, white, female teachers' common fear of Africa bonds them, but fear alone is no match for bitchery within the ranks ... Jungle Lovers: Life is not easy in Malawi for the dedicated insurance salesman, nor for the revolutionary terrorist. So from the moment when Calvin Mullet of Homemakers International is taken prisoner by the ruthless Marais and attempts to sell him a policy, their fortunes become strangely interwoven ...

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About the author (1996)

Paul Edward Theroux was born on April 10, 1941 in Medford, Massachusetts and is an acclaimed travel writer. After attending the University of Massachusetts Amherst he joined the Peace Corps and taught in Malawi from 1963 to 1965. He also taught in Uganda at Makerere University and in Singapore at the University of Singapore. Although Theroux has also written travel books in general and about various modes of transport, his name is synonymous with the literature of train travel. Theroux's 1975 best-seller, The Great Railway Bazaar, takes the reader through Asia, while his second book about train travel, The Old Patagonian Express (1979), describes his trip from Boston to the tip of South America. His third contribution to the railway travel genre, Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China, won the Thomas Cook Prize for best literary travel book in 1989. His literary output also includes novels, books for children, short stories, articles, and poetry. His novels include Picture Palace (1978), which won the Whitbread Award and The Mosquito Coast (1981), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Theroux is a fellow of both the British Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Geographic Society. His title Lower River made The New York Times Best Seller List for 2012. Currently his 2015 book, Deep South, is a bestseller.

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