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Elspeth Huxley was born in 1906, the daughter of Major Josceline Grant of Njoro, Kenya, where she spent most of her childhood. She was educated at the European School in Nairobi and at Reading University where she took a diploma in agriculture, and at Cornell University, USA. In 1929 she joined the Empire Marketing Board as a press officer. She married Gervas Huxley in 1931 and travelled widely with him in America, Africa and elsewhere. She was on the BBC General Advisory Council from 1952 to 1959, when she joined the Monckton Advisory Commision on Central Africa. She wrote novels, detective fiction, biography and travel titles, and her books include The Flame Trees of Thika (1959), The Challenge of Africa (1971), Livingstone and His African Journeys (1974), Florence Nightingale (1975), Scott of the Antarctic (1977), Nellie: Letter from Africa (1980), Whipsnade: Captive Breeding for Survival (1981), The Prince Buys the Manor (1982), Last Days in Eden (1985, with Hugo van Lawick) and Out in the Midday Sun: My Kenya (1985). She died in 1997.
The Flame Trees of Thika is a marvellous book, painting an unforgettable portrait of Huxley's early life in Kenya at the turn of the century. After an enforced absence of four years, during which the spectre of war has cast a large shadow, Huxley and her mother return to their beloved Africa; this backdrop forming the foundation for this sequel to Thika, which is just as captivating as its predecessor. Huxley's trump card as a writer is her instinctive feel for the sort of gorgeous descriptive detail that transforms the prosaic into the powerfully poetic; you can almost smell the images of Africa that she so atmospherically conjures for the reader. Yet despite this very welcome advantage the book offers far more than merely a wealth of detail; in essence it provides a memorable snapshot into a bygone era that by its very focus charts the history of both a family and a nation. Her picture of a continent at once brutal and beautiful is engrossing reading; a combination of autobiography and travel memoir that fuses the best aspects of each. Whether an armchair traveller or intrepid explorer Huxley's evocative chronicle makes one long to leap on a plane to see the Africa that first captured her imagination all those years ago. (Kirkus UK)
