West with the Night: A Memoir of Adventure and Survival

Louise P: The true story of this woman aviator is so well written, you’ll want to read it just for the writing! It’s also a story of Africa and it’s changes. This brave woman is so full of adventure it’s one romp after another. She has so many adventures that she doesn’t even discuss the final, larger than life transAtlantic feat until the very end of the book. I’d highly recommend this book and really look forward to our book club discussion about it.

United States on Nov 02, 2023

Amazon Customer: The writing style is descriptive and the character development is very good. There is no boasting of the amazing accomplishments and endeavours of Beryl- just a reeling in of the reader to experience the adventure.

United States on Oct 20, 2023

mary: She was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic in the 1930’s Ernest Hemingway said that she wrote better then he did. Her writing was beautiful prose and descriptive . Amazing detail of growing up in Africa. Her childhood experiences were alarming to this reader but written as a normal upbringing. There was informative description of learning to fly without maps or instruments on the airplane. Being taught to learn by instinct, feel and knowledge of the elements.

United States on Oct 04, 2023

alex Thomas: As I had been born in Nairobi this was the most wonderful and vivid book to bring Africa alive again. Also such an intrepid adventurer and aviator and a women!

United Kingdom on Aug 31, 2023

Amazon Groupie: Excellent account of how Beryl Markham flew across the Atlantic from East to West. The first woman to do so. Sadly, not many people talk about her incredible achievement.

United Kingdom on Jun 22, 2023

Ubique: My father lived in Kenya in 1940s so I have an interest in books of this era. This book is much underrated- or forgotten- but is incredibly descriptive of a wonderful country at a point in history. It’s of its time, of course, but shows Beryl as a brave lady.

United Kingdom on Sep 17, 2022

Secret Spi: “West with the Night” is the title of Beryl Markham’s memoirs of her childhood and young adult life (as a racehorse trainer and bush pilot) in what is now Kenya. She was an unconventional woman - adventurous, original and insightful - and a talented writer.

A wonder and respect for the landscape and people of Africa comes through in her writing, as well as a healthy disregard for some aspects of civilisation: “the tyranny of clocks." Markham’s approach to animals is unsentimental, and some readers would probably rather skim through some of the sections involving boar and big game hunting.

The episodes in this unusual life are recalled in a manner that is by turns gripping and brutal, transporting and descriptive, moving and amusing.

I was more interested in the aviation aspect of Markham’s life than the horses, and there were some chapters mid-way where my attention wandered a little, but I’m not a horsey person. I did wonder that there wasn’t more mention of Markham’s family (apart from her father) and husbands, although no doubt this can be read in a biography.

This is a beautifully written book, and one I didn’t want to leave -...

Germany on Mar 26, 2021

Luna Saint Claire: This is a stunning book, with gorgeous sentences enough to stop you so you can catch your breath, only to read them over again and highlight them so you can go back and read them again once more. The remains doubt whether Beryl Markham wrote them, or if they were written by her screenwriter third husband Raoul Schumacher. Out of Africa, written by Karen Blixen under the pen name Isak Dinesen, had always been my favorite memoir. West with the Night, is equal in its beauty, and I hesitate to say, maybe more so. The romance with which we become infatuated, is Africa as well as hunting, horse training, and flying. In a sentence such as this one, how can it not:
“It is still the host of all my darkest fears, the cradle of mysteries always intriguing, but never wholly solved. It is the remembrance of sunlight and green hills, cool water and the yellow warmth of bright mornings. It is as ruthless as any sea, more uncompromising than its own deserts. It is without temperance in its harshness or in its favours. It yields nothing, offering much to men of all races.”
And in reading this passage, I can only weep. This is the writing Hemingway praised in his review, “she has...

United States on Nov 13, 2017

Hazel ZorabTanzi: I felt a real affinity with this book as Kenya is the background to our family, and this should show the "real" Beryl Markham as it is her autobiography, albeit she is reticent about parts of her life such as her mother abandoning her as a child and the many love affairs she had. These things must have affected the woman she became. However, as I had already read Circling the Sun, her biography written by Paula McClain, I found contradictions in Beryl's life that had me frequently checking between the two books - very irritating.!! For instance - where did her father go after leaving Kenya for the first time - Peru or Cape Town?; was Markham her second or first husband? Surely the facts in West With The Night must be the correct ones?

United Kingdom on Jul 18, 2017

Richard C. Reynolds: Born Beryl Clutterbuck in 1902, she moved from England to Kenya with her father when she was just a girl of five. She went on a hunt for warthogs when she was a young girl and her faithful dog Buller was gored by the hog but survived to live several more years. Beryl was rather fearless and the Kenyan natives called her “Beru” because it was easier to pronounce.
As a teen, she was fascinated with horses. Along with two native helpers, she delivered a colt from a pregnant mare. She named him Pegasus and her father told her the horse was now her own. Later, as a young woman, she became a trainer of horses. How does she become an aviatrix? She’s riding her horse one day and spots a man whose car has broken down. The man is Tom Campbell Black, an RAF captain during WWI, and she believes that he figures into her “Destiny” to become a pilot.
In a later chapter, when Beryl is on the Athi Plains next to Nairobi, an airplane lands at night and it’s Tom Black, bringing an injured man and the ashes of another man. She writes about the look in his eyes that was disturbing in its clarity: eyes that might have followed the trajectory of a dead cat through a chapel window with...

United States on Jul 02, 2015