Recommendations
Books Like Out of Africa
Best books to read after Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
Out of Africa is one of the greatest memoirs of the twentieth century — Karen Blixen's account of seventeen years in Kenya, written in full knowledge of what had been lost. If the memoir's extraordinary beauty and its portrait of belonging to a place and its people moved you, these books share its concern with Africa as a space of moral and spiritual transformation, its interest in the nature of belonging and exile, and its conviction that the relationship between a person and a landscape can be as deep as any human relationship.
- 1Buy
Seven Gothic Tales
by Isak Dinesen
The essential companion — Dinesen's first book, a collection of stories set in nineteenth-century aristocratic Europe; where Out of Africa is organized around memory and loss, Seven Gothic Tales is organized around the fantastic and the uncanny; both show Dinesen as one of the great storytellers in the European tradition, operating in completely different registers
- 2Buy
Shadows on the Grass
by Isak Dinesen
The direct companion to Out of Africa — four shorter pieces about Dinesen's years in Kenya; together with Out of Africa, Shadows on the Grass gives the full picture of what she made of her African experience; essential reading after Out of Africa for the additional material about the people and the landscape
- 3Buy
The Flame Trees of Thika
by Elspeth Huxley
Huxley's memoir of her childhood on a Kenya farm — the most important parallel to Out of Africa from a different temporal and personal perspective; where Dinesen writes about Africa as a mature woman looking back on years of loss, Huxley writes from childhood; together they give a fuller picture of the settler experience in colonial Kenya
- 4Buy
A Grain of Wheat
by Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Ngugi's novel about Kenya in the days before independence — the essential Kenyan literary parallel to Out of Africa; where Dinesen writes about Kenya from the perspective of the settler who loves the land and its people but whose position is fundamentally colonial, Ngugi writes from the perspective of the Kikuyu people whose land and independence were at stake; both are essential reading for understanding the history Dinesen moves through
- 5Buy
Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe
Achebe's novel about the destruction of Igbo culture by British colonialism — the essential African parallel to Out of Africa for understanding what the colonial period meant from the perspective of the colonized; Achebe famously said that Conrad's Heart of Darkness needed to be read alongside African literature; the same is true of Out of Africa
- 6Buy
The English Patient
by Michael Ondaatje
Ondaatje's novel about identity, landscape, and the Second World War in North Africa and Italy — the most important contemporary literary parallel to Out of Africa in its concern with the relationship between a person and a landscape and with the extraordinary claims that landscape can make on the people who know it
- 7Buy
Kristin Lavransdatter
by Sigrid Undset
The companion in Scandinavian fiction organized around a woman's complete life and her relationship to a landscape — Kristin's life in medieval Norway; where Dinesen's memoir covers seventeen African years, Undset's trilogy covers an entire life; both are organized around a woman's experience of a world that defines her by her relationships rather than her identity
- 8Buy
The Sheltering Sky
by Paul Bowles
Bowles's novel about American expatriates who go too deep into the Sahara — the most unsettling parallel to Out of Africa in the tradition of the literary work about what Africa does to the person who enters it without protection; where Dinesen's Africa is a place of belonging and beauty that she loses, Bowles's Africa is a place of dissolution that the person who enters it without belonging cannot survive
More Out of Africa Resources
More Reading Recommendations
View all →Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.