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

Rwanda: With Eastern Congo (Bradt Travel Guide)

Bradt’s Rwanda has been the go-to guide for visitors to this historical and resurgent ‘Land of a Thousand Hills’ for nearly two decades, and it continues to be in a class of its own when it comes to in-depth information on this emerald slice of East Africa. With freshly researched and updated details on developments across the country, Bradt’s Rwanda includes up-to-date maps of rapidly modernising Kigali, information on hiking to the summit of Mount Bisoke and a newly expanded chapter on excursions into the neighbouring DRC.

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.

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.

Birds of East Africa

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.

Explore Rwanda: Journey into the Heart of
Rwanda’s Remarkable Landscapes and Culture

Explore Rwanda offers a vivid expedition through Rwanda’s breathtaking landscapes and rich cultural fabric. Its pages invite you to experience mist-covered mountains, lively markets, and meaningful traditions like Umuganda and Kwita Izina, all captured through engaging storytelling and striking photography. This guide serves not just as a travel companion but as a gateway to understanding Rwanda’s history, resilience, and ongoing progress.
It benefits travelers seeking a deeper connection with the country’s people, heritage, and natural beauty, making it a valuable addition to any journey planning focused on authentic cultural immersion.

History & Autobiographies

Inside Hotel Rwanda

Survivor Edouard Kayihura tells his own personal story of what life was really like during those harrowing 100 days within the walls of that infamous hotel and offers the testimonies of others who survived there, from Hutu and Tutsi to UN peacekeepers. Kayihura tells of his life in a divided society and his journey to the place he believed would be safe from slaughter. Inside the Hotel Rwanda exposes Paul Rusesabagina as a profiteering, politically ambitious Hutu Power sympathizer who extorted money from those who sought refuge, threatening to send those who did not pay to the genocidaires, despite pleas from the hotel’s corporate ownership to stop.

A Thousand Hills: Rwanda’s Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It

A Thousand Hills: Rwanda’s Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It is the story of Paul Kagame, a refugee who, after a generation of exile, found his way home. Learn about President Kagame, who strives to make Rwanda the first middle-income country in Africa, in a single
generation. In this adventurous tale, learn about Kagame’s early fascination with Che Guevara and James Bond, his years as an intelligence agent, his training in Cuba and the United States, the way he built his secret rebel army, his bloody rebellion, and his outsized ambitions for Rwanda.

Gorillas In The Mist

Fossey’s extraordinary efforts to ensure the future of the rain
forest and its remaining mountain gorillas are captured
in her own words and in candid photographs of this fascinating
endangered species. As only she could, Fossey combined her personal adventure story with groundbreaking scientific reporting in an unforgettable portrait of one of our closest primate relatives. Although Fossey’s work ended tragically with her murder, Gorillas in the Mist remains an invaluable testament to one of the longest-running field studies of primates and reveals her undying passion for her subject.

Land of Second Chances: The Impossible Rise of Rwanda’s Cycling Team

Land of Second Chances is the inspiring true story of four men
who found a new hope for Rwanda. Meet Adrien Niyonshuti, Tom Ritchey, Jonathan Boyer, and Paul Kagame. In a land clamoring for heroes, they confront impossible odds as they struggle to put an upstart cycling team on the map–and find redemption in the eyes of the world. Land of Second Chances is an inspirational story of hope
and victory for Africa.

Life Laid Bare: The Survivors in Rwanda Speak

In the late 1990s, French author and journalist Jean Hatzfeld
made several journeys into the hilly, marshy region of the Bugesera, one of the areas most devastated by the Rwandan genocide of April 1994, where an average of five out of six Tutsis were hacked to death with machete and spear by their Hutu neighbors and militiamen. In the villages of Nyamata and N’tarama, Hatzfeld
interviewed fourteen survivors of the genocide, from orphan teenage farmers to the local social worker. For years the survivors had lived in a muteness as enigmatic as the silence of those who survived the Nazi concentration camps. In Life Laid Bare, they speak for those who are no longer alive to speak for themselves; they tell of the deaths of family and friends in the churches and marshes to which they fled, and they attempt to account for the reasons behind the Tutsi extermination.

Literature

A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali

A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali is a moving, passionate love story set amid the turmoil and terror of Rwanda’s genocide. All manner of
Kigali residents pass their time by the pool of the Mille-Collines hotel: aid workers, Rwandan bourgeoisie, expatriates, UN peacekeepers, prostitutes. Keeping a watchful eye is Bernard Valcourt, a jaded foreign journalist, but his closest attention is devoted to Gentille, a hotel waitress with the slender, elegant build of a Tutsi. As they slip into an intense, improbable affair, the delicately balanced world around them–already devastated by AIDS–erupts in a Hutu-led genocide against the Tutsi people.

Baking Cakes in Kigali

This soaring novel introduces us to Angel Tungaraza: mother, cake baker, pillar of her community, keeper of secrets big and small. Angel’s kitchen is an oasis in the heart of Rwanda, where visitors stop to order cakes but end up sharing their stories, transforming their lives, leaving with new hope. In this vibrant, powerful setting, unexpected things are beginning to happen: A most unusual wedding is planned, a heartbreaking mystery involving Angel’s own family unravels, and extraordinary connections are made—as a chain of events unfolds that will change Angel’s life and the lives of those around her in the most astonishing ways.

Running the Rift: A Novel

Running the Rift follows the progress of Jean Patrick Nkuba from the day he knows that running will be his life to the moment he must run to save his life. A naturally gifted athlete, he sprints over the thousand hills of Rwanda and dreams of becoming his country’s first Olympic medal winner in track. But Jean Patrick is a Tutsi in a world that has become increasingly restrictive and violent for his people. As tensions mount between the Hutu and Tutsi, he holds fast to his dream that
running might deliver him, and his people, from the brutality around them.

Broken Memory: A Novel of Rwanda

Hiding behind the old sofa, five- year-old Emma does not witness
the murder of her mother, but she hears everything. And when the assassins finally leave, the young Tutsi girl somehow manages to stumble away from the scene, motivated only by the memory of her mother’s last words: “You must not die, Emma!” Taken in by an old Hutu woman, Mukecuru, Emma is still haunted by nightmares
long after the war ends. When the country establishes gacaca courts to allow victims to face their tormenters in their villages, Emma is uneasy and afraid. But through her growing friendship with a young torture victim and the gentle encouragement of an old man charged with helping child survivors, Emma finds the courage to return to the house where her mother was killed and begin the journey to healing.

Our Lady of the Nile: A Novel

Parents send their daughters to Our Lady of the Nile, an elite Catholic boarding school to be molded into respectable citizens and to escape the dangers of the outside world. Fifteen years prior to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, we watch as these girls try on their parents’ preconceptions and attitudes, transforming the lycée into a microcosm of the country’s mounting racial tensions and violence. In the midst of the interminable rainy season, everything unfolds behind the closed doors of the school: friendship, curiosity, fear, deceit, prejudice, and persecution. With masterful prose that is at once subtle and penetrating, Mukasonga captures a society hurtling towards horror.