You learn not to mourn every little thing out here, or you’d never, ever stop grieving.

One of the things about being raised British in Africa is that you get this double whammy of toughness. The continent in place itself made you quite tough. And then you've got this British mother whose entire being rejects 'coddling' in case it makes you too soft. So there's absolutely nothing standing between you and a fairly rough experience.

I always knew mum loved me - tough, look-after-yourself love, as if she knew she wouldn't always be there.

It's a long day's drive any way you look at it. With a man who has taken your sins - real and imagined - and stitched them onto the sackcloth of his own soul, it is endless.

FBI Girl is a gorgeous, sumptuous book. Conlon-McIvor takes a subject (herself and her family) that might have sunk in other hands, beats egg white under her words and the whole thing rises like a dream. It's a love story for her people and for a time and place. Read it.

Once, I discovered the skulls of two impala rams, their horns locked into an irreversible figure-of-eight; the two animals had been trapped in combat, latched to each other during the battle of the rut. The harder they had pulled to escape from each other, the more intractably stuck they were, until they had fallen exhausted, to their knees, in an embrace of hatred that had killed them both.

There aren't enough doctors in Africa. Those who choose to become doctors here don't do it for the money or because they want to do good. They do it because they have to heal, the way most people need to breathe or eat or love.