A Good Man in Africa

Morgan Leafy had high hopes when he first headed out to the small African nation of Kinjanja to serve as Her British Majesty's representative. But once there, Leafy's dreams of professional advancement and personal happiness soon fade: this son of an airport catering manager finds himself overtaken on the career ladder by other, newer recruits to the diplomatic corps who come from the right family and attended the right schools. What's worse, the girl of his dreams has just become engaged to someone younger, thinner, and better connected. And if all this weren't enough to make a career civil servant miserable, Leafy is also being blackmailed by a representative of one of Kinjanja's many political parties who has presented him with a puzzling task: get to know the Scottish medical doctor at a local university.

Author William Boyd has written about Africa before, most notably in his bestselling novel Brazzaville Beach. In A Good Man in Africa, Boyd spins a darkly comic tale of political corruption, revolution, sexual misadventure, blackmail, and death. By novel's end, Leafy may not have become a better man--or even a much wiser one--but he has acquired a kind of dignity and gritty courage for which he is well suited.

William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana and grew up there and in Nigeria. His first novel, A Good Man in Africa (1981), won the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Somerset Maugham Prize. His other novels are An Ice Cream War (1982, shortlisted for the 1982 Booker Prize and winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Stars and Bars (1984), The New Confessions (1987), Brazzaville Beach (1990, winner of the McVitie Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize), The Blue Afternoon (1993, winner of the 1993 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award), Armadillo (1998), Any Human Heart (2002, winner of the Prix Jean Monnet) and Restless (2006, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year Award). His latest novel is Ordinary Thunderstorms (2009). Some thirteen of his screenplays have been filmed, including The Trench (1999), which he also directed, and he is also the author of four collections of short stories: On the Yankee Station (1981), The Destiny of Nathalie 'X' (1995), Fascination (2004) and The Dream Lover (2008). He is married and divides his time between London and South West France.