Sometime last month, Fiat.Luxury posted a CBR review of Nicholas Drayson’s A Guide to the Birds of East Africa and I was intrigued. As an unashamed lover of all things Alexander McCall Smith, I thought this book sounded charming and gentle–a necessary antidote to the gritty things I typically read. Mr. Malik is a sixty-something Indian expat to Kenya, and he is secretly in love with Rose Mbikwa, a widow who runs the weekly meeting of the East African Ornithological Society. Mr. Malik’s old nemesis, […]
This is not actually a book about birds.
Well this was a surprisingly delightful little book. Mr. Malik is a “short, round, balding brown man”–a sixty-something widower with a comb-over. After his wife’s death, on his doctor’s advice, he picked up a hobby: birds. Every Tuesday morning, he joins the East African Ornithological Society bird walk, led by Rose Mbikwa, Scottish widow of a Nairobi politician. Mr. Malik most definitely has a (quiet) crush on Ms. Mbikwa. One Tuesday, the showy and good-looking Harry Khan, Mr. Malik’s former classmate, shows up at the bird walk. […]