Roald Dahl was a spy, ace fighter pilot, chocolate historian and medical inventor. He was also the author of Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG and many more brilliant stories.

Roald Dahl

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

Quentin Blake

It was truly the most breathless and in a way the most exhilarating time I have ever had in my life. 
 
 
This beautiful edition of Going Solo, part of The Roald Dahl Classic Collection, features official archive material from the Roald Dahl Museum and is perfect for Dahl fans old and new. 
 
So, enter a world where invention and mischief can be found on every page and where magic might be at the very tips of your fingers . . . 
 
The Roald Dahl Classic Collection reinstates the versions of Dahl’s books that were published before the 2022 Puffin editions, aimed at newly independent young readers.

Going Solo

Penelope Lively

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/collections/book-bundles-modern-classics/?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Linked_text&amp;utm_campaign=Penguin_Modern_Classics_Series_26_06">Choose 3 timeless classics for only £21 over on the Penguin Shop</a>

This autobiography is about growing up in Egypt. It is also an investigation into childhood perception in which the author uses herself and her memories as an insight into how children see and know. It is a look at Eygpt up to, and including, World War II from a small girl's point of view, which is also, ultimately, a moving and rather sad picture of an isolated and lonely little girl.

Oleander, Jacaranda

A Childhood Perceived

ABC Merriman-Labor

In Britons Through Negro Spectacles Merriman-Labor takes us on a joyous, intoxicating tour of London at the turn of the 20th century. Slyly subverting the colonial gaze usually placed on Africa, he introduces us to the citizens, culture and customs of Britain with a mischievous glint in his eye. This incredible work of social commentary feels a century ahead of its time, and provides unique insights into the intersection between empire, race and community at this important moment in history.

Britons Through Negro Spectacles

Bamba Suso

Banna Kanute

A child is born who will overthrow a king... 
 
After the leader of a great African kingdom hears that a baby has been born who will destroy him, he hides behind a mighty army and surrounds himself with magical charms. There remains only one way to kill him. 
 
Concealing this secret weakness from the world, the ruler clings to power. But when the sister of his enemy seduces him, lust overwhelms the king. And as he lies beside her in the night, desperate to know her body, he foolishly begins to share his secret...

The Sunjata Story

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Ngugi wa Thiong'o was born the fifth child of his father's third wife, in a family that includes twenty-four children born to four different mothers. He spent his 1930s childhood as the apple of his mother's eye, before attending school to slake what is considered a bizarre thirst for learning. 
 
As he grows up, the wider political and social changes occurring in Kenya begin to impinge on the boy's life in both inspiring and frightening ways. Through the story of his grandparents and parents, and his brothers' involvement in the violent Mau Mau uprising, Ngugi deftly etches a tumultuous era, capturing the landscape, the people and their culture, and the social and political vicissitudes of life under colonialism and war.

Dreams in a Time of War

Romeo Dallaire

In conflicts around the world, there is an increasingly popular weapon system that needs negligible technology, is simple to sustain, has unlimited versatility, and an incredible capacity for both loyalty and barbarism. What are these cheap, renewable, plentiful, sophisticated, and expendable weapons? Children. 
 
This important book is part of a passionate personal mission against the use of child soldiers, by the three-star general who commanded the UN mission in Rwanda. 
 
When Romeo Dallaire was tasked with achieving peace there in 1994, he and his force found themselves caught up in a vortex of civil war and genocide. He left Rwanda a broken man, disillusioned, suicidal, a story he told in the award-winning international sensation Shake Hands with the Devil. 
 
Now, in They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children, Dallaire provides an emotionally daring and intellectually enlightening introduction to the child soldier phenomenon, as well as concrete solutions for its total eradication. 
 
Dallaire speaks up for those without a voice - children in conflicts around the globe who do not choose to fight, but who through ill-fate and the accident of birth find their way into soldiering. This is a book that addresses one of the most harrowing, urgent and important issues of our time.

They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children

Chris Froome

WINNER OF THE 2018 GIRO D'ITALIA! 
 
THREE TIME WINNER OF THE TOUR DE FRANCE. 
 
THE FIRST MAN SINCE BERNARD HINAULT TO HOLD THE MAGLIA ROSA, THE MAILLOT JAUNE AND THE MAILLOT ROJO AT THE SAME TIME. 
 
This is Chris Foome in his own words. 
 
'Engaging, vividly evoked' Mail on Sunday, Books of the Year 
 
'What Chris has done is phenomenal' Sir Chris Hoy 
 
Sunday Times Bestseller, July 2014

The Climb

The Autobiography

Donald R Morris

In 1879, armed only with their spears, their rawhide shields, and their incredible courage, the Zulus challenged the might of Victorian England and, initially, inflicted on the British the worst defeat a modern army has ever suffered at the hands of men without guns. 
 
This is the definitive account of the rise of the Zulu nation under the great ruler Shaka and its fall under Cetshwayo. The story is studded with tales of drama and heroism: the Battle of Isandhlwana, where the Zulu army wiped out the major British column; and Rorke's Drift, where a handful of British troops beat off thousands of Zulu warriors and won eleven Victoria Crosses. 
 
Acclaimed for its scholarship, its monumental range, and its spellbinding readability, The Washing of the Spears is a gripping portrait of not just the Zulu War of 1879, but also of Britain’s colonial policy at this moment.

The Washing Of The Spears

The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Nation Under Shaka and its Fall in the Zulu War of 1879

John Bierman

Who was the real 'English patient'? The desert explorer Laszlo Almasy, on whom the character was loosely based, was very different from the romantic hero of the prize-winning novel anmd multiple Oscar-winning movie of that name. But a similar aura of mystery surrounds them both. While the fictional Almasy gave the Germans his desert maps only because he was desperate to keep a promise to his dying mistress, the real-life Almasy worked for Germany military intelligence only because he was desperate for the chance to return to the desert he loved more than anything or anybody else. Or so John Bierman implies in this arresting and carefully-researched biography. Among its many unexpected revelations is that far from being the love of his friend's wife, Almasy was a homosexual with no interest at all in the opposite sex. Nor was he really a count, although he was born into the minor Hungarian nobility. In short, the real-life Almasy remains an enigma. For instance there is good reason to believe that he became a double agent working for both sides in World War II - and compelling evidence that he spied for British intelligence during the Cold War.

The Secret Life of Laszlo Almasy

The Real English Patient

Siân Rees

Sweet Water and Bitter is the extraordinary sequel to Britain's abolition of the slave trade in 1807. The last legal British slave ship left Africa that year, but other countries and illegal slavers continued to trade. When the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, British diplomats negotiated anti-slave-trade treaties and a 'Preventive Squadron' was formed to cruise the West African coast. In six decades, this small fleet liberated 150,000 Africans and lost 17,000 of its own men doing so. This is the tale of their exciting and arduous campaign. 
 
It is a story of unforeseen consequences and a swashbuckling naval adventure, full of sensational, first-hand accounts of life at sea; of the grim 'barracoons', the slave-brokers' luxurious compounds and the lonely garrisons dotting the coast. Combining flawless research with an intimate and dramatic narrative, this is a voyage that no one will forget.

Sweet Water and Bitter

The Ships that Stopped the Slave Trade

Laurens Van Der Post

Summoned to Whitehall in 1949, Laurens van der Post was told that in old British Central Africa there were two large tracts of country that London didn't really know anything about, and could he go in there on foot and take a look, please? Venture to the Interior is the account of that journey, a journey filled with adventure and discovery, flying from London across Europe and Africa, and after days in small aircraft, on foot across the mountains to the two lost worlds of central Africa.

Venture To The Interior

Susan Williams

Sir Seretse Khama, the first President of Botswana and heir apparent to the kingship of the Bangwato people, brought independence and great prosperity to his nation after colonial rule.  But for six long years from 1950, Seretse had been forced into exile in England, banned from his own country.  His crime?  To fall in love and marry a young, white English girl, Ruth Williams.  Delving into newly released records, Susan Williams tells Seretse and Ruth's story - a shocking account of how the British Government conspired with apartheid South Africa to prevent the mixed-race royal couple returning home.  But it is also an inspiring, triumphant tale of hope, courage and true love as with tenacity and great dignity Seretse and Ruth and the Bangwato people ovecome prejudice in their fight for justice.

Colour Bar

The Triumph of Seretse Khama and His Nation

Jonny Steinberg

When Asad was eight years old, his mother was shot in front of him. With his father in hiding, he was swept alone into the great wartime migration that has scattered the Somali people throughout the world. 
 
This extraordinary book tells Asad’s story. Serially betrayed by the people who promised to care for him, Asad lived his childhood at a sceptical remove from the adult world, living in a bewildering number of places, from the cosmopolitan streets of inner-city Nairobi to towns deep in the Ethiopian desert. 
 
By the time he reached the cusp of adulthood, Asad had made good as a street hustler, brokering relationships between hardnosed Ethiopian businessmen and bewildered Somali refugees. He also courted the famously beautiful Foosiya, and married her, to the astonishment of his peers. 
 
Buoyed by success in work and in love, Asad put $1,200 in his pocket and made his way down the length of the African continent to Johannesburg, whose streets he believed to be lined with gold. So began an adventure in a country richer and more violent than he could possibly have imagined. A Man of Good Hope is the story of a person shorn of the things we have come to believe make us human – personal possessions, parents, siblings. And yet Asad’s is an intensely human life, one suffused with dreams and desires and a need to leave something of permanence on this earth.

A Man of Good Hope

One Man's Extraordinary Journey from Mogadishu to Tin Can Town

Rian Malan

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR 
 
In '70s' South Africa, Rian Malan – descendant of the architects of apartheid, middle-class white boy, friend to blacks – went to work as a crime reporter for a local Johannesburg rag. There he encountered first-hand the horrors wrought by apartheid: the poverty, injustice and violence. After an eight-year exile, he returned to write this book. With gripping stories and in mesmerising prose, this is Malan’s attempt to understand his country, its racial hatred, and his own tortured conscience.

My Traitor's Heart

Blood and Bad Dreams: A South African Explores the Madness in His Country, His Tribe and Himself

Daniel Bergner

In this moving and unforgettable narrative journalist Daniel Bergner travels into the heart of Sierra Leone, a country torn apart by war. This is the story of the people he encounters in a realm of fire and jungle as they rebuild their lives: Lamin, who lost his hands to save his daughter; Komba, child soldier and sometime cannibal; Neall Ellis, the mercenary pilot with a conscience; Valentine Strasser the embittered ex-dictator; and the Western outsiders trying to save a land of startling beauty and brutality. 
 
Shocking, often heartbreaking yet ultimately hopeful, Soldiers of Light is a story of survival and a haunting work of literary reportage.

Soldiers of Light

Damien Lewis

This book chronicles the story of the single most daring Special Forces operation since World War Two - Operation Barras; the attempted rescue by the SAS of the British Forces who were being held captive by guerrilla gang the West Side Boys in the Sierra Leone jungle. The West Side Boys were a strange-looking bunch, wearing pink shades, shower caps, fluorescent wigs and voodoo charms they believed made them invulnerable to bullets - an impression re-enforced by ganja, heroine, crack cocaine and gallons of sweet palm wine. In 1999 a twelve man patrol of Royal Irish Rangers, who were training government troops in Sierra Leone, were captured and held hostage by the West Side Boys. They were held prisoner in a fortified jungle hideaway, with severed heads decorating the palisades, defended by some 400 heavily armed soldiers. Operation Barras, the rescue mission, was a combined force of 100 Paras, twelve members of the Special Boat Squadron, helicopters from the Navy and RAF and, spearheading the operation, 40-strong D squadron of the SAS. Against amazing odds the hostages were rescued - over 150 of the enemy were killed. Operation Certain Death is a thrilling true story of all out war. No hostages taken. Blood-letting on a vast scale inflicted on a very blood-thirsty enemy. A gripping piece of true military history, perfect for fans of action adventure stories and anyone interested in the top secret division of the British Army.

Operation Certain Death

Elspeth Huxley

In this sequel to The Flame of Thika, Elspeth Huxley takes up her story after the family returns to Kenya after the First World War. Her family and friends, their home and their travels, the glorious wildlife and scenery, described in rich and loving detail, all spring to life in this enchanting book. 'She knows East Africa and she loves it. . . with a critical and understanding sympathy. ' The Times 'What a marvellous writer. . . and what a Kenya it was. ' Financial Times

The Mottled Lizard

Ian Young

Ian Young spent a summer as a medical student in a provincial maternity unit in Algeria.  This book is taken from the diary he began on arrival, when he found himself the privileged witness of the insides not just of Kabyl women, but also some much-trumpeted ideology. The immediate villains are a couple of expatriate Bulgarian gynaecologists.  Dr Vasilev, at the closing stages of a career of fathomless incompetence, forms a bond of affection with the author and they spend many hours in the office over an old route map of Bulgaria, discussing mileages and motorcycles as Maternity drifts beneath them like an abandoned ship.  Dr Kostov packs a powerful bedside punch and saves his humanitarian feelings for the health of the Deutschmark.  The two form a macabre comic team as they take the reader through a series of medical nightmares.  But their lot is scarcely more enviable than that of their female victims: the foreign doctors are the unhappy executors, working in blood, excrement and death, of the most respected attitudes in Algeria. The Private Life of Islam is a ruthlessly clear-sighted view of a particular place at a particular time.  It is also a classic in the art of story-telling.'A real achievement, personal as well as literary.' David Pryce-Jones, The Times'A parable of the reality behind a vast amount of modern social and political fantasy, even in the most developed of countries.' David Holden, Sunday Times

The Private Life Of Islam

An Algerian Diary

During the early fifties, Kenya was a country in turmoil. While Ngugi enjoys scouting trips, chess tournaments and reading about Biggles at the prestigious Alliance School near Nairobi, things are changing at home. He arrives back for his first visit since starting school to find his house razed to the ground and the entire village moved up the road closer to a guard checkpoint. Later, his brother, Good Wallace, who fights for the rebels, is captured by the British and taken to a concentration camp. Finally, Ngugi  himself comes into conflict with the forces of colonialism when he is victimised by a police officer on a bus journey and thrown in prison for six days. This fascinating memoir charts the development of a significant voice in international literature, as well as standing as a record of the struggles of a nation to free itself.

In the House of the Interpreter

A Memoir

Candice Millard

At age twenty-four, Winston Churchill believed that to achieve his ambition of becoming Prime Minister he must do something spectacular on the battlefield. Although he had put himself in extreme danger in colonial wars in India and Sudan, and as a journalist covering the Spanish-American War in Cuba, glory and fame had eluded him. Churchill arrived in South Africa in 1899 to cover the brutal colonial war against the Boers. Just two weeks after his arrival, he was taken prisoner. Remarkably, he pulled off a daring escape - but then had to traverse hundreds of miles of enemy territory alone. The story of his escape is extraordinary enough, but then Churchill enlisted, returned to South Africa, fought in several battles and ultimately liberated the men with whom he had been imprisoned. Millard tells a magnificent story of bravery, savagery and chance encounters with a cast of historical characters - including Rudyard Kipling, Lord Kitchener and Gandhi - with whom he would later share the world stage, and gives us an unexpected perspective on one of the iconic figures in our history.

Hero of the Empire

The Making of Winston Churchill

Joyce Tyldesley

For nearly two thousand years after the last pharaoh ruled Egypt the wonders of this ancient culture remained hidden, seemingly lost and forgotten for ever. Then, in the late eighteenth century, Napoleons invasion of the country sparked an explosion of interest in ancient Egypt that burns as strongly today as ever. The obsession with anything and everything Egyptian has inspired many to dedicate their lives to the search for treasure in Egypts sands.   All of these explorers, collectors and archaeologists can be loosely classified as Egyptologists and this relatively new science has been blessed with more than its fair share of intriguing characters, some of whom, by virtue of their larger-than-life personalities, curious habits or spectacular finds, have come to dominate the story of the rediscovery of ancient Egypt - the story of this book.  In 'Egypt: How A Lost Civilization was Rediscovered', highly respected author and archaeologist Joyce Tyldesley follows these real-life Indiana Joneses in their quest for the splendid monuments, tombs and artefacts that have unlocked many of the secrets of this mesmerizing civilization. From the nail-biting race to crack the hieroglyphic code to Howard Carters dramatic discovery of the golden treasures in Tutankhamen's tomb - surely the most heart-stopping moment in the history of archaeology - we experience the excitement, emotion and intrigue of this gripping adventure story.    Praise for Joyce Tyldesley:    Tyldesley has added a new, more human dimension her book should be required reading. Sunday Times on Ramses: Egypts Greatest Pharaoh

Egypt

How A Lost Civilisation Was Rediscovered

Dominic Green

This is the story of what happens when a liberal minded Prime Minister is caught between two sets of fundamentalists, one Islamic, the other Christian. It could be a tale of our time. But this is actually the story of Islam and the Empire on the Nile c. 1869. 
 
In the late 19th century the river Nile became the setting for the first major encounter between the West and Islam in the modern era. In an extraordinary collision between Europeans, Arabs and Africans, three empires rose in the space of thirty years. In the climax of this drama, played out in a remote part of the Sudan, we see the rise of the British Empire to its most glorious heights, but also the seeds of its fall. The personalities are legends: William Gladstone, General Gordon, Winston Churchill and General Kitchener. Yet this is a story also told through the eyes of the outsiders - a missionary, a slave trader, a palace clerk and an ordinary soldier. 
 
Using never before transcribed material from newly translated government papers in Cairo and Khartoum, Green will tell both sides of the story, using his acclaimed skill as a story-teller so that the effect is that of an old photo album whose recurring characters and themes carry a wide sweep of time and events, and tells the story of a time when good intentions became compromised, finally giving way to realpolitik, and how on such changes of attitude empires rise and fall.

Armies Of God

Islam and Empire on the Nile, 1869-1899

Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch's modern classic We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families opened our eyes to the 1994 genocide of Rwanda's Tutsi minority: close to a million people murdered by their neighbours in one hundred days. Now Gourevitch brings us an intimate exploration of how killers and survivors live together again in the same communities, grappling with seemingly impossible burdens of memory and forgetting, vengefulness and forgiveness. 
 
 A powerful literary reckoning, You Hide That You Hate Me and I Hide That I Know is the culmination of twenty-five years of reporting. The book takes its title from a Rwandan adage that speaks to the uneasy trade-offs that reconciliation demands. Since the genocide, Rwanda has engaged in the most ambitious and sweeping process of accountability ever undertaken. 'Truth Heals' was the slogan. But truth also wounds. And truth is always contested. 
 
 As Gourevitch returns to the same families in one small hillside village, their accounts of killing and surviving inform and enlarge one another, illuminating the ways that we seek, individually and collectively, to negotiate our irreparable pasts. This moving book continuously invites us - as only great writing can - to think, and to think again.

You Hide That You Hate Me and I Hide That I Know

Julia Blackburn

A spellbinding new book by the much-acclaimed writer, a journey to South Africa in search of the lost people called the /Xam - a haunting book about the brutality of colonial frontiers and the fate of those they dispossess. 
 
In spring 2020, Julia Blackburn travelled to the Karoo region of South Africa to see for herself the ancestral lands that had once belonged to an indigenous group called the /Xam. 
 
Throughout the nineteenth century the /Xam were persecuted and denied the right to live in their own territories. In the 1870s, facing cultural extinction, several /Xam individuals agreed to teach their intricate language to a German philologist and his indomitable English sister-in-law. The result was the Bleek-Lloyd Archive: 60,000 notebook pages in which their dreams, memories and beliefs, alongside the traumas of their more recent history, were meticulously recorded word for word. It is an extraordinary document which gives voice to a way of living in the world which we have all but lost. 'All things were once people', the /Xam said. 
 
Blackburn's journey to the Karoo was cut short by the outbreak of the global pandemic, but she had gathered enough from reading the archive, seeing the /Xam lands and from talking to anyone and everyone she met along the way, to be able to write this haunting and powerful book, while living her own precarious lockdown life. Dreaming the Karoo is a spellbinding new masterpiece by one of our greatest and most original non-fiction writers. 
 
'An astounding, disarming book, full of grief and beauty' Olivia Laing 
 
'Blackburn's wise, wonderfully idiosyncratic books are poetic, informed by a...genius for serendipity' Lucy Hughes-Hallett, New Statesman

Dreaming the Karoo

A People Called the /Xam

Sandy Gall

A mix of history and current affairs, travel, reportage and anecdote, this passionate book speaks up for the Bushmen, the first people of Africa. 
 
*Featuring a preface by Prince Charles* 
 
Bushmen were hunting and gathering, painting and mining copper, thousands of years ago. They were the first people of Africa. Deadly shots with their bows and arrows, they were, in their heyday, Lords of the Desert. They fought extremely bravely for their land, and lost. Today, they have been reduced to an underclass - dispossessed, despised and degraded. Just in time - one is tempted to say, miraculously - the Mandela government saved them from extermination in South Africa. Now, in Botswana's Central Kalahari Game Reserve, set aside specially for them by the British in 1961, they are making their last stand, refusing to be evicted in order to benefit mining and tourism. Sandy Gall, who is best known for his reporting of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, has taken up the cause of the Bushmen. His interest in their plight dates back to the 1950s and 1960s when he was working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters; in 1999 he visited the Central Kalahari with his daughter Michaela. 
 
His book celebrates the culture of these unique people, many of whom have an almost mystical bond with animals. He has portrayed many fascinating individuals who have been involved, for good or ill, in their tragic history and their present predicament. Here, for the first time, is the full story of the slaughter of an innocent people. The Bushmen of Southern Africa speaks not only for the Bushmen but for the native indigenous people of the world. It faces up to a shameful and bloodstained past and looks at burning current issues such as human rights and the ownership and exploitation of land.

The Bushmen of Southern Africa

Slaughter of the Innocent

Mary Kingsley

Until 1893, Mary Kingsley lived the typical life of a single Victorian woman, tending to sick relatives and keeping house for her brother. However, on the death of her parents, she made an extraordinary decision: with no prior knowledge of the region, she set out on a solo trip to West Africa. Her subsequent book, published in 1897, describes dangerous treks and deadly animals with enormous humour and verve, and has stood the test of time as a classic travel narrative by a woman whose sense of adventure and fascination with Africa transformed her whole life.

Travels in West Africa

Tom Sharpe

When Miss Hazelstone of Jacaranda Park kills her Zulu cook in a sensational crime passionel, the gallant members of the South African police force are soon on the scene: Kommandant van Heerden, whose secret longing for the heart of an English gentleman leads to the most memorable transplant operation yet recorded; Luitenant Verkramp of the Security Branch, ever active in the pursuit of Communist cells; Konstabel Els, with his propensity for shooting first and not thinking later - and also for forcing himself upon African women in a manner legally reserved for male members of their own race. 
 
In the course of the strange events which follow, we encounter some very esoteric perversions when the Kommandant is held captive in Miss Hazelstone's remarkable rubber room; and some even more amazing perversions of justice when Miss Hazelstone's brother, the Bishop of Barotseland, is sentenced to be hanged on the ancient gallows in the local prison. 
 
Not a 'political' novel in any previously imagined sense, Riotous Assembly provided a completely fresh approach to the South African scene - an approach startling in its deadpan savagery and yet also outrageously funny.

Riotous Assembly

Sunjata Keita was the founder of one of the greatest empires of Western Africa. These two epic accounts of his life portray a greedy, slow-witted child - said to have crawled until the age of seven - who grew up as prophecy foretold to become a mighty warrior, renowned for his bravery and superhuman strength. They describe how, with the help of his sister, who seduced their arch-enemy Sumanguru into revealing his secret powers, Sunjata defeated the  Susu overlords and created the Mali Empire which would last for two centuries. Based on events from the early thirteenth century, these tales of heroism and magic are still celebrated across West Africa as part of a living epic oral tradition.

Sunjata

Gambian Versions of the Mande Epic

In this marvelous anthology, Elspeth Huxley, our best and most popular writer on Africa, has drawn on her unparalleled knowledge of Kenya and its literature to present a fully rounded portrait of one of the most fascinating countries in the world. In nine sections focusing on exploration, travel, settlement, war, hunting, wildlife, environment, life-styles, and legend and poetry, using only first-hand accounts, she guides the reader through the story of Kenya from AD100 to the present with her characteristic candour and directness.

Nine Faces Of Kenya

Sophy Roberts

In 1879, King Leopold II of Belgium launched an ambitious plan to plunder Africa’s resources. The key to cracking open the continent, or so he thought, was its elephants — if only he could train them. And so he commissioned the charismatic Irish adventurer Frederick Carter to ship four tamed Asian elephants from India to the East African coast, where they were marched inland towards Congo. The ultimate aim was to establish a training school for African elephants.Following in the footsteps of the four elephants, Roberts pieces together the story of this long-forgotten expedition, in travels that take her to Belgium, Iraq, India, Tanzania and Congo. The storytelling brings to life a compelling cast of historic characters and modern voices, from ivory dealers to Catholic nuns, set against rich descriptions of the landscapes travelled. She digs deep into historic records to reckon with our broken relationship with animals, revealing an extraordinary — and enduring — story of colonial greed, ineptitude, hypocrisy and folly.

A Training School for Elephants

The Roald Dahl Series

Penguin Readers Roald Dahl

The Roald Dahl Classic Collection

Roald Dahl’s Words for…

biblio.categories.code

biblio.publicationStatus

biblio.brand

biblio.workEditions.format

biblio.ageRange

biblio.series.seriesName

biblio.imprint.description

biblio.type

About us

About Us (Header 4)

Best-Jane-Austen-quotes_Online-Desktop_Penguin

James-Baldwin

Marian-Keyes

haruki-murakami-320×320-1

Richard-Osman

Malorie Blackman

Lisa-Jewell

Charlie-Mackesy

Authors (Header 3)

Children&#039;s

Company

Discover

Fiction

Non-fiction

Penguin Classics

Penguin Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

Work with us

Search Results

Frankenstein

Wings

Flesh

Puffin Announces The Roald Dahl Classic Collection to keep author’s classic texts in print

acts you didn’t know about James and the Giant Peach

Features

7 juicy facts you didn’t know about James and the Giant Peach

An illustration by Quentin Blake of Matilda standing on top of a pile of books

Extracts

Matilda by Roald Dahl

A photo of the book The BFG by Roald Dahl on a light blue background

The BFG by Roald Dahl

The Kumback II by Roald Dahl

Children's reading lists

Where to start with Roald Dahl’s books

Children's quizzes

Which Roald Dahl hero are you?

A photo of a young girl laying on the floor with a pair of headphones on, looking at her phone whilst she plays an audiobook

10 audiobooks for a listen-aloud adventure

How to be a great storyteller | The Roald Dahl Museum

How to be a great storyteller

Christmas gifts for 2025: Books for 6 to 9-year-olds

6 of the most gloriumptious Roald Dahl heroes

Are you Roald Dahl's biggest fan?

Ten hopscotchy moments in Roald Dahl books

10 hopscotchy moments in Roald Dahl books

A picture of a few sheets from the Roald Dahl activity pack on a light purple background

Crafts &amp; activities

Download the Roald Dahl Story Day 2021 activity pack

11 inspirational quotes that celebrate books and the joy of reading

A photo of a young boy holding a copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and a 'golden ticket' from the book. He is standing against a bright purple background

Make your own Charlie and the Chocolate Factory costumes

Things you didn't know classic Puffin children's books

4 things you didn’t know about these classic Puffin children’s books

How to write a laugh-out-loud story by Steven Butler

How to write a laugh-out-loud funny story

An illustration by Quentin Blake of The BFG holding Sophie in his hand

13 inspiring Roald Dahl quotes

A photo of the DIY Enormous Crocodile word game. You can see a child's hands holding the cardboard crocodile and in the background is the book Roald Dahl: Words

Make an Enormous Crocodile word game

An image of three classic children's books on a light blue background with a shape that has a star pattern

Showing results for: ‘roald dahl’

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Series

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter