Beryl Markham moved to Kenya with her father at the age of four and stayed until her death in 1986. Her incredible autobiography describes the Africa she learnt to love: her childhood surrounded by the tribal people, her tangles — often nearly fatal — with its wild animals and her passions for racehorses and aeroplanes.

Markham achieved notoriety and success as a horse trainer when one of her horses won the most prestigious race in Kenya. She turned her hand to aeroplanes with Denys Finch Hatton, the lover of Karen Blixen, as a teacher and became the first woman in Kenya to receive a commercial pilot's licence. Her adventures and courageous career as a bush pilot are recounted in vivid detail here, along with the richness and fascination of life in Kenya in the twenties and thirties.