Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller

This is almost a companion novel to a memoir the author wrote about her personal experience of a child growing up in Africa. This book is written from the perspective of her parents, who are Europeans choosing to stay in Africa throughout their lifetime. While the story line is not nearly as gruesome as the one in JM Coetzee's fictional novel ;Disgrace', it is not an easy read. Her mother is a Kenyan by birth, then moved to what was then Rhodesia, and when that became an untenable prospect, moved to where they live today, Zambia. They are farmers. They do not live an extravagant life. They have experienced things that would not have befallen them if they lived in a first world country. Most shockingly, they have had three children die of things that were either preventable or treatable at the time they happened. So the lack of accessible medical care harms blacks and whites alike in this story. It is a largely unflinching look at Africa through the lens of her parent's generation. It reflects the quickly shifting political landscape of Africa, as well as the difficulty of being an immigrant on a continent that is less and less hospitable to it's colonial past, without truly dealing with what it's future needs to include. Sad and sobering.