Leaves from the Fig Tree

'Duff is a natural storyteller. Her deadpan humour, ear for the vernacular and shrewd insight into the history of Ireland and Africa raises it above the genre of misty-eyed nostalgia. It's a terrific read.' - Michele Magwood, South African Sunday TimesRaised by her eccentric grandparents at Annes Grove in County Cork, a stately Irish home famed for its beautiful gardens, Diana Duff grew up in an enchanted world of family ghosts, buried treasure and banshees. At the age of seventeen, Diana left Ireland in search of excitement, glamour and the heady freedom of fifties' Kenya. After working as a stand-in for Grace Kelly in the film Mogambo, and training as a nurse, she married a young officer, and the couple moved to an isolated house in Kikuyu land at the height of the bloody Mau Mau rebellion. In the sixties, Diana and her family relocated to Tanganyika, where she founded the first multi-racial nursery school in East Africa before a transfer saw the family shifting to a South Africa cruelly divided by Apartheid.