Tennis and the Masai

Take a nervous Englishman with no previous experience of teaching. Drop him into a ghastly Kenya prep school in the middle of Rider Haggard country. A school where cricketing news comes by carrier pigeon, leopards are assaulted with a red-hot poker, and runaway boys are hunted down with spearmen and a pack of foxhounds.

For Martin Riddle the experience is unforgettable. For the riding mistress, Lady Bullivant, it is all part of the day’s work. And for the headmaster, a disgraced ex-Guards officer, it is simply a means of staving off bankruptcy for a few more weeks.

As for the Masai, tennis may be on the curriculum at Haggard Hall, but midnight meetings with naked warriors definitely are not!

Book Author

Nicholas Best grew up in Kenya, of Anglo-Irish origin, and was educated there, in England, and at Trinity College, Dublin. He served a spell in Britain’s Grenadier Guards, during which he was airlifted to Belize to prevent its invasion by Guatemalan tanks - an experience that gave him his first short story (in Penthouse) and a satirical novel Where were you at Waterloo? Thereafter he worked in London as a financial journalist before becoming a full time writer. He is the author of Happy Valley: the Story of the English in Kenya, Tennis and the Masai (a comic novel later seri...
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Book Reviews

• Sir Alec Guinness
  "Very good entertainment’"
• Daily Telegraph
  "The funniest book of the year"
• Sunday Times
  "The funniest book I have read since David Lodge’s Small World’"
• Daily Mail
  "Wickedly funny"
• Evening Standard
  "Less savage than Evelyn Waugh, Best is every bit as sharp... an immensely enjoyable book"