num_pages: 624
description: Mark Shaw is a young architect living in London.One bitter winter day an exhausted man arrives on his doorstep. He has travelled from Nairobi to bring Mark a message. Mark’s father, Neil Shaw – a buccaneering figure, big game hunter, best selling novelist and womaniser – has been arrested for murder.Mark had been brought up in Spain after his mother had been killed on their remote estate in Kenya. Now he returns, to discover a dangerous situation on the lonely Plateau which both sets of his grandparents, together with one other family, the Donaldsons, had colonised in the 1920s. A feud has existed between the two families for many years and it is Neil’s contemporary, Martin Donaldson, who has been killed.Mark is urged by his father’s lawyer to find out exactly what happened that day. In doing so he uncovers Neil’s life, the hidden life of which his son knew almost nothing. It is a journey back in time.Paralleling this search is the story of Neil’s wish to turn the clock back in Africa; of the game sanctuary he creates and his obsession with freedom, symbolised by four lions with which he identifies. But the old Africa has gone and he cannot come to terms with the new. Finally there is the question of a murder thought to have been solved a long time ago.In seeking answers to all these questions the story moves from London to Kenya to southern Spain in the 1950s, to New York and back to Kenya. Alan Scholefield , who knows Africa well, is a masterly storyteller, whose gripping and convincing novels are unfailingly entertaining.Alan Scholefield was born in Cape Town in 1931 and was educated at Queen’s College, Queenstown, and the University of Cape Town. He now lives with his Australian wife, the novelist Anthea Goddard, in the south of England. They have three daughters. Most famous for his Macrae and Silver series, Scholefield has also written other novels, including Venom , which was made into a film in 1981.
language: English
title: The Last Safari
titlecomplete: The Last Safari (U)
ratings_count: 13
publisher: Ulverscroft