To Catch the Sun

Description

With panache and humour Caroline Cass tells the story of a Kenyan childhood, her strongest memories tinged with a sense of limitless freedom and adventure. She describes her colourful young life among the Maasai and wild game during the 1950s. Although only later understanding the underlying politics, Cass also writes vividly of how the unsettling five-year Mau Mau uprising affected her family and friends.

At 18 she moved with her family to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where coming to her maturity she discovered love and moved to a wider world: America, with her journalist husband, a memorable time of Vietnam War protests and Watergate. After seven years which saw the birth of her two daughters she moved to London, starting a career as a writer and journalist, as well as travelling: Borneo, China, Morocco, India, ‘boozy Bangkok’ and Afghanistan.

Cass likes to amuse, to describe some of the events of her life in a way that will give humorous enjoyment. Through a patchwork of tales, flickering through six generations of a family drawn to the furthest corners of the British Empire, she writes of the many memorable places she has passed through and often remarkable individuals she has met. Political turmoil in nearly all the countries in which she lived, racing crocodiles across the Zambezi, falling in love, prayer breakfasts with Nixon, wearing a burqa and learning to shoot a Kalashnikov: all form part of the saga.