Penguin Modern Classics: Red Strangers

Red Strangers is a unique novel, spanning four generations of a Kikuyu family in Africa and their relationship with European settlers, nicknamed 'red' strangers because of their sunburn. The reader is drawn into the heart of a Kenyan tribe, so that we come to understand their way of life with its rituals, its beliefs, its codes and its morality. Europeans and their customs are seen in stark, unflattering contrast with the Kikuyu, in, for example, their attitudes to war, methods of cultivation, the administering of justice and use of money. Epic in its scale, Red Strangers is a thoroughly engrossing story of a family, a people and a culture whose existence is dramatically and damagingly transformed by the forces of colonisation.
'Its 400 pages are gripping, moving, historically and anthropologically illuminating, humanistically mind-opening...'
Richard Dawkins