Ernest Hemingway · 1935 · overland

Hemingway's second work of non-fiction, from a safari with his wife Pauline in December 1933, paid for by her uncle Gus as a wedding present. He set out to prove that an absolutely true book could compete with a work of the imagination - and wrote a hunting memoir that is mostly about failing to shoot a kudu while his friend keeps shooting bigger ones.

1. 1
   Mombasa

   They sail from Marseilles on 22 November 1933 and land on the Kenyan coast in early December - Hemingway already carrying the amoebic dysentery that will put him in hospital before the safari properly begins.

2. 2
   Nairobi

   The outfitting, and the white hunter Philip Percival - who had guided Theodore Roosevelt in 1909, is the Pop of the book, and whom Hemingway spends the whole narrative talking to about Tolstoy and what makes writing true.

3. 3
   Machakos

   A fortnight getting used to the altitude, getting his eye in, and listening to Percival's stories of the bush - the last stretch of the trip in which nothing has yet gone wrong between the two hunters.

4. 4
   Arusha

   They cross into Tanganyika through the customs post at Namanga on 20 December and spend a last night of comfort at Arusha - and everything in the book proper happens south and west of here.

5. 5
   Lake Manyara

   From the top of the rift wall, the forest below and the long dried edge of the lake rose-coloured at one end with half a million tiny dots that were flamingos - the best sentence Hemingway wrote about Africa.

6. 6
   Ngorongoro

   Up the escarpment to the crater and the high country beyond, where the days start running out and the rivalry with Karl - Charles Thompson of Key West - turns from a joke into the thing the book is about.

7. 7
   Babati

   South from Manyara to new hunting ground, and in the last days he finally kills a magnificent kudu bull and comes back to camp elated - and finds Karl has shot a bigger one, which is the ending and the only honest one available.