The White Masai

The White Masai is at once a hopelessly romantic love story, a gripping adventure yarn, and, incidentally, a fine piece of meticulously observed social anthropology. It is also a compulsive read. Corinne Hofmann falls in love with a Masai warrior while on holiday with her boyfriend in Kenya. After overcoming all sorts of obstacles, she moves into a tiny shack with him and his mother in his village, and spends four years in Kenya. Slowly but surely the dream starts to crumble until she flees back home with her baby daughter born out of the seemingly indestructible love between a white European woman and a Masai. From close shaves with wild animals to the rigours of a subsistence existence in the bush, disease, malnutrition, hunger, ritual mutilation and, overriding it all, a consuming passion for another, almost wholly alien, human being, this is a book steeped in humanity: one which emphasises how much we all share, and how much has come to separate us. Simply unputdownable.