The White Masai - Hardcover

Hofmann, Corinne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0061131520 ISBN 13: 9780061131523

Publisher: Amistad, 2006

Synopsis

The four-million-copy international bestseller of the incredible love story between a European woman and an African warrior

The White Masai combines adventure and the pursuit of passion in a page-turning story of two star-crossed lovers from vastly different backgrounds. Corinne, a European entrepreneur, meets Lketinga, a Samburu warrior, while on vacation in Mombasa on Kenya's glamorous coast.Despite language and cultural barriers, they embark on an impossible love affair. Corinne uproots her life to move to Africa—not the romantic Africa of popular culture, but the Africa of the Masai, in the middle of the isolated bush, where five-foot-tall huts made from cow dung serve as homes. Undaunted by wild animals, hunger, and bouts with tropical diseases, she tries to forge a life with Lketinga. But slowly the dream starts to crumble when she can no longer ignore the chasm between their two vastly different cultures.

A story that taps into our universal belief in the power of love, The White Masai is at once a hopelessly romantic love story, a gripping adventure yarn, and a compulsively good read.

About this title

About the Author:

Corinne Hofmann has written three books based on her life story, including two sequels to The White Masai—Back from Africa, which is a bestseller in Germany, and Reunion in Barsaloi, which was released in 2005. She lives with her teenage daughter in Switzerland.

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. One glance at a Masai warrior "wearing almost no clothes—just a short loincloth—but lots of jewelry," and Hofmann, a Swiss business woman on vacation in Kenya, abandons all in obsessive pursuit of Lketinga who has "never been to school, can't read or write and barely speaks English." The passion is palpable and sometimes purple ("I feel myself at one with this man and now, this night, I know that despite all the barriers between us, I have already become a captive of his world"). Seekers of romance and adventure will be amply rewarded, but the power of Hofmann's memoir rests in her hard-won capacity to take the reader inside the domestic world of the African bush as she learns to be Lketinga's wife (living in her own dung hut), grappling with unfamiliar sexual and gender manners and struggling to balance her commitment to bush life with the knowledge and resources she has as a European woman (acquiring a car, starting a business). The idyll, spoiled by Lketinga's bouts of jealous fits, ends after four years when Hofmann, with their daughter, flees to Switzerland. Hofmann's commitment, however, lingers and infuses her account with an affecting richness that defies the reader to ridicule her decision to give "up [her] whole life back in Switzerland for Lketinga." (Oct.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Amistad
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0061131520
• ISBN 13: 9780061131523
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320