From the Samuel Johnson Prize shortlisted author, a powerful literary memoir about life in rural Nairobi, one of the last true wildernesses of the world. Aidan Hartley's family has always moved from farm to farm, propelled mostly across Africa, though once to Devon. Slowly, Aidan began to understand that his family's choice to live on farms was little to do with the business of agriculture. Their instinct and his inherited urge was to avoid other people and make a home in the lone, wild paradise. Farming became a state of mind, a fugitive one. Now, Aidan has his own farm in view of the Kenyan Mountain. His work is dosing sheep, dipping cattle, fixing machinery, responding to the night alarms of rustlers entering the valley on elephant raids. Living here, injury means relying on a manual called Where There is No Doctor, and the home medicine chest complete with blood coagulants for gunshot wounds.

It is a landscape tragically at risk. Across the course of Aidan's life, before his eyes, the nature around him has changed. The wild hunting dog, cheetah, rhinos, elephants - even the giraffe and lion - face oblivion. Whole forests have been torn down. Kenya Mountain on the horizon is losing its tropical icefields - they will be gone in a handful of years. Paradise of Thorns is a restlessly inventive literary memoir: the story of Aidan's departure from cities and the irresistible call that pulled him back to the wilds. It is part glorious testament to the extraordinary heart of rural Africa as a place which is fast becoming lost, part antidote to the chicanery written about the country over the centuries, and part adventure story of drug trade, cattle raids, gunfights, lost friends, ambushes, posses and battles. Gold title * RECOGNISED INSIGHT ON AFRICA.

Aidan grew up in Africa, but came to England for an undergrad at Oxford and a further degree at SOAS, where he studied African politics and history. As a foreign correspondent for Reuters, he covered Africa in the 1990s, including wars in Somalia, famine in Ethiopia and genocide in Rwanda. For eighteen years has written a column called Wild Life for the Spectator. * AUTHOR OF THE ZANZIBAR CHEST: A Memoir of Love and War, which was brilliantly reviewed as a masterpiece of journalistic autobiography and a deeply moving memoir, and short-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize (previously Samuel Johnson Prize). * ESTEEMED DOCUMENTARY MAKER of thirty television documentaries, most of them for the Channel 4 Television award-winning current affairs series Unreported World and Dispatches. * THE REAL STORY ON RURAL AFRICA. Aidan knows and loves this place. A big part of the book is about the Samburu people.

This is a book that can set some records straight: an antidote to a white colonial story as well as being very much a post-colonial tale. * DOCUMENTS THE EFFECTS OF GLOBALISATION AND THE TRAGIC, IMMINENT LOSS OF RURAL AFRICAN LIFESTYLE. Competition: Don't Let's Go to the Dogs; I Dreamed of Africa; Out of Africa; Flame Trees of Thika; Zanzibar Chest; Happy Valley; Kintu; Shadow of the Sun. Alexandra Fuller; Kuki Gallman; Elspeth Huxley; Onyinkan Braithwaite;; Novuyo Tshuma; Christina Lamb; Martin Meredith; Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi; Westover;.