Books › West with the night
West with the night
First published 1942 · 388 pages
A breathtakingly lyrical soaring over the vast, sun-drenched landscapes of early twentieth-century East Africa.
What it feels like
Reading this memoir feels like stepping into a vast, sun-drenched expanse where the air is thin and the horizon stretches on forever. The narrative moves with a steady, muscular grace, blending the feral energy of a wild childhood with the solitary, meditative focus of early aviation. The prose is the true star here, breathtakingly lyrical, unsentimental, and crafted with a precision that leaves you lingering over individual sentences. It is an elegiac, deeply atmospheric experience that immerses you in the dust, the danger, and the profound silence of the sky. This is a book for those who crave fierce independence and sweeping, evocative nature writing, offering a transcendent journey that feels both intimately grounded and magnificently untethered.
- Mood
- expansive
- sun-drenched
- solitary
- awe-inspiring
- Tone
- unsentimental
- poetic
- observant
- elegiac
- adventurous
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- the freedom of flight · solitude in vast landscapes · the fading of wild places · radical independence · human and animal bonds
- The writing
- Lush, muscular, and breathtakingly lyrical, the sentences are crafted with a precision that rivals the greatest modernist literature.
- The arc
- The journey moves from the wild, grounded wonder of a feral childhood into the soaring, solitary transcendence of early aviation.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave fiercely independent narrators, sweeping landscapes, and memoirs that read like high literary art.
Content notes
- animal death
- hunting
- colonial context
About the book
A pioneer aviator's life in Africa.
From a letter to Maxwell Perkins: "Did you read Beryl Markham's book, West with the Night? I knew her fairly well in Africa and never would have suspected that she could and would put pen to paper except to write her flyer's log book. As it is, she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But [she] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers. The only parts of it that I know about personally, on account of having been there at the time and heard the other people's stories, are absolutely true.... I wish you would get it and read it because it is really a bloody wonderful book." (Ernest Hemingway)
Description from Open Library.
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