‘I have rarely read a book of such passion and honesty’

Roger Clarke, Sunday Times

Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the Thomas Cook Award for the best travel book of the year

‘West Africa. Blinding white light, dust and scrub, salt flats and mangrove swamps, a village called Dulaba in the Gambia. People are scratching a living out of rice, groundnuts, millet. To Mark Hudson, a casual visitor, Dulaba in 1985 was a place of fascination, its stark landscape vivid with the presence of its women…Out of his year in the village has come a wonderful book. Reading it is like watching a picture being painted. A moving, even a majestic book’
Listener.

Superbly written in a spare, simple prose, Our Grandmothers’ Drums is a work of extraordinary resonance, a classic travel book to stand beside Gerald Brenan’s ‘South from Granada’ and Norman Lewis’s ‘Voices of the Old Sea’.

‘A powerful evocation of village life written in simple and beautiful prose’
Weekend Telegraph

‘Full of dark moods and chaotic exhilaration’
Sunday Times