Here is a brief selection of favorite, new and hard-to-find books, prepared for your journey. You will find below direct links to Amazon where you will be able to purchase the following recommended books in your preferred format.
Travel & Field Guides
Insight Guides to Kenya
From deciding when to go, to choosing what to see when you arrive, this is all you need to plan your trip and experience the best of Kenya, with in-depth insider information on must-see, top attractions like Mount Kenya and the Maasai Mara National Reserve, and hidden cultural gems like the Gede Ruins.
The Safari Companion: A Guide to Watching African Mammals
An invaluable encyclopedic guide to Africa’s mammals by a noted scientist, this perennial bestseller includes black-and-white drawings, an overview of each animal group and in-depth information. Written with a
typical safari-goer in mind.
Wildlife of East Africa
Featuring full-color photos of 475 common species of bird, mammal, snake, lizard, insect, tree, and flower, Wildlife of East Africa takes us on an exquisite one-volume tour through the living splendor of the main national parks and game reserves of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. Many of the species included–from pelicans to plovers, ostriches to elephants, from the daintiest of antelopes to cattlelike giants, from leopards to lions, baboons to gorillas, chameleons to crocodiles, acacias to aloes–also inhabit neighboring countries.
Birds of East Africa: Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi
Featuring revised text and distribution maps, the latest taxonomy, and much more, this comprehensive but compact guide describes and illustrates 1,448 species―all the resident, migrant, and vagrant birds of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi―in convenient facing-page layout. Featuring 289 color plates with more than 3,500 painstakingly rendered images, the guide depicts all the plumages and major races likely to be encountered. Introductory sections include
information on conservation and where to send records, as well as maps of important bird areas.
The Kingdon Pocket Guide to African Mammals
A conveniently compact edition of Kingdon’s celebrated guide that includes information on distribution, ecology and conservation status, with 480 outstanding color illustrations and maps. This is an essential guide for anyone with an interest in wildlife who visits Africa.
Lonely Planet Swahili Phrasebook & Dictionary
Lonely Planet’s Swahili Phrasebook and Dictionary is
your handy passport to culturally enriching travels with the most
relevant and useful Indian phrases and vocabulary for all your travel needs. Learn the names of wildlife, chat with the locals and adventure on safari; all with your trusted travel companion.
History & Autobiographies
Out of Africa
In this book, the author of Seven Gothic Tales gives a true account of her life on her plantation in Kenya. She tells with classic simplicity of the ways of the country and the natives: of the beauty of the Ngong Hills and coffee trees in blossom: of her guests, from the Prince of Wales to Knudsen, the old charcoal burner, who visited her: of primitive festivals: of big game that were her near neighbors–lions, rhinos, elephants, zebras, buffaloes–and of Lulu, the little gazelle who came to live with her, unbelievably ladylike and beautiful.
Unbowed: A Memoir
In Unbowed, Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai recounts her extraordinary life. When Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, she began a vital poor people’s environmental movement, focused on the empowerment of women, that soon spread across Africa. Persevering through run-ins with the Kenyan government and personal losses, and jailed and beaten on numerous occasions, Maathai continued to fight tirelessly to save Kenya’s forests and to restore democracy to her beloved country.
Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britains Gulag in Kenya
As part of the Allied forces, thousands of Kenyans fought alongside the British in World War II. But just a few years after the defeat of Hitler, the British colonial government detained nearly the entire population of Kenya’s largest ethnic minority, the Kikuyu- some 1.5 million people. The compelling story of the system of prisons and work camps where thousands met their deaths has remained largely untold-the victim of a determined effort by the British to destroy all official records of their attempts to stop the Mau Mau uprising, the Kikuyu people’s ultimately successful bid for Kenyan independence.
Wildflower: An Extraordinary Life and Mysterious Death in Africa
With compassion and an unswerving regard for the truth, veteran journalist MarkSeal lays bare the deeply moving, inspirational story of Joan Root, a dedicated environmentalist and Oscar-nominated wildlife filmmaker. He covers her early days in Kenya as a shy young woman with an almost uncanny ability to connect to animals; her whirlwind courtship with the dashing Alan Root, their marriage, and the twenty years of nonstop adventure and passionate romance that followed, both in Africa and around the world; the shattering disintegration of the marriage and partnership; and Joan’s triumphant struggle to reinvent herself as the protector of her lakeshore community’s fragile ecosystem—a struggle that would lead to her tragic death in January 2006.
Facing Mount Kenya
With an Introduction by Bronislav Malinkowski, Facing Mount Kenya is a central document of the highest distinction in anthropological literature, an invaluable key to the structure of African society and the nature of the African mind. Facing Mount Kenya is not only a formal study of life and death, work and play, sex and the family in one of the greatest tribes of contemporary Africa, but a work of considerable literary merit. The very sight and sound of Kikuyu tribal life presented here are at once comprehensive and intimate, and as precise as they are compassionate
Literature
Desertion: A Novel
Early one morning in 1899, an Englishman named Martin Pearce stumbles out of the desert into an East African coastal town and collapses at the feet of Hassanali, a local shopkeeper. When Hassanali’s sister, the beautiful and disillusioned Rehana, nurses Pearce back to health, a love affair sparks, with consequences that will ripple decades into the future, when another clandestine affair bursts into flame, with equally unforeseen and dramatic consequences. In this devastating and ingeniously spun tale, the Nobelist Abdulrazak Gurnah brilliantly dramatizes the personal and political legacies of colonialism.
The Constant Gardener
The novel opens in northern Kenya with the gruesome murder of Tessa Quayle — young, beautiful, and dearly beloved to husband Justin. When Justin sets out on a personal odyssey to uncover the mystery of her death, what he finds could make him not only a suspect among his own colleagues, but a target for Tessa’s killers as well. A master chronicler of the betrayals of ordinary people caught in political conflict, John le Carré portrays the dark side of unbridled capitalism as only he can.
Dust
When a young man is gunned down in the streets of Nairobi, his grief-stricken father and sister bring his body back to their crumbling home in the Kenyan drylands. But the murder has stirred up memories long since buried, precipitating a series of events no one could have foreseen. As the truth unfolds, we come to learn the secrets held by this parched landscape, hidden deep within the shared past of a family and their conflicted nation.
A Grain of Wheat
Set in the wake of the Mau Mau rebellion and on the cusp of Kenya’s independence from Britain, A Grain of Wheat follows a group of villagers whose lives have been transformed by the 1952–1960 Emergency. At the center of it all is the reticent Mugo, the village’s chosen hero and a man haunted by a terrible secret. As we learn of the villagers’ tangled histories in a narrative interwoven with myth and peppered with allusions to real-life leaders, including Jomo Kenyatta, a masterly story unfolds in which compromises are forced, friendships are betrayed, and loves are tested.
City of Saints & Thieves
16-year-old master thief Tina has been living on the streets for years following the murder of her mother. She’s part of the Goonda gang and has devised an elaborate scheme to exact vengeance on Roland Greyhill, the man she believes responsible for the crime. But when she breaks into the Greyhill home, she’s not only captured by his son Michael but forced to consider whether someone else committed the murder. With Michael and gifted computer hacker Boyboy in tow, Tina sets off on a search for the truth, a journey that will put her in danger almost every step of the way.
Weep Not, Child
Two brothers, Njoroge and Kamau, have different futures: Njoroge is to attend school, while Kamau will train to be a carpenter. But this is Kenya, and the times are against them: the Mau Mau is waging war against the white government, and the two brothers and their family need to decide where their loyalties lie. For Kamau, the choice is simple, but for Njoroge the scholar, the dream of progress through learning is a hard one to give up.
