About the Author

Christina Lamb is an award-winning journalist who, since graduating from Oxford twelve years ago, has lived overseas as a correspondent for the Financial Times in Pakistan and Brazil, a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, and correspondent for the Sunday Times in South Africa. A fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, she is an inveterate traveller. Her previous book, Waiting for Allah- Pakistan's Struggle for Democracy, was published by Hamish Hamilton and Penguin. She is currently Foreign Affairs Correspondent for the Sunday Times and lives with her husband and young son in London and Portugal.

Reviews

Shiwa House is a magnificent, dilapidated rural estate in Zambia: built in the early years of the 20th century and resembling an English ancestral home, it was "completely... out of place in this remote corner of the African bush," writes Lamb, a journalist and author of the highly praised Sewing Circles of Herat. Her narrative, spanning more than half of the 20th century, not only reconstructs Shiwa House's original glory but details the intimate world of its builder, the egotistical Sir Stewart Gore-Browne, whom President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia honored with a state funeral in 1967. Concentrating on the evolution of Gore-Browne's nostalgically conceived estate in a remote outpost of British colonial Northern Rhodesia, Lamb evokes the beauty of the unspoiled countryside, its teeming wildlife, Gore-Browne's love of hunting, his friendly relations with locals and his eccentric attempt to model his estate on that of his cherished Aunt Ethel in England. Lamb recounts Gore-Browne's romantic affections for his beautiful, older married aunt and his equally perverse marriage to the much younger daughter of an old flame; his largely unsuccessful political campaigns; and his unexpectedly wholehearted support of Zambian independence. The narrative is engaging and well crafted, although Lamb's attempts at dramatizing her subjects' emotional lives sometimes read like a romance novel, and her narrow focus on the house's history obscures the wider context of waning British empire. 16 pages of b&w photos, maps. Agent, David Godwin. (Jan.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

With the help of a three-page bibliography of books, archives, periodicals, and primary sources, Lamb (foreign affairs correspondent, London's Sunday Times; The Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage Through Afghanistan) creates a fascinating "speaking" portrait of Sir Stewart Gore-Browne, honored, when he died in August 1967, as "the only white man in Central Africa to have received both a state funeral and a chief's burial." The house referred to in the title is Gore-Browne's country estate built in 1923 in Northern Rhodesia, "a magnificent three-storey pink-bricked mansionpart Tuscan manor house, part grand English ancestral home." Gore-Browne himself becomes an extraordinary presence, something of the 19th-century imperial British persona that Edgar Wallace captured in novels like Sanders of the River. Kenneth Kaunda, the first president of Zambia, best summed up Gore-Browne as "one of the most visionary people in Africa-he was born an English gentleman and died a Zambian gentleman." Recommended for all libraries with a special interest in Africa and colonial history.-Robert C. Jones, Warrensburg, MO Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.