Leaving Before the Rains Come

The sequel to the international bestseller Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight.

Remarkable, beautifully written and fantastically entertaining… a compulsive read

[An] honest, powerful and moving memoir

[An] urgent, eloquently fearless book

[A] bold, brave memoir of [Fuller’s] emancipation from the past

Fuller doesn’t write misery memoirs. She writes warm, humorous and honest memoirs, and Leaving Before the Rains Come is another must-read

What sets [the book] apart is Fuller’s prose, as biting and beautiful as ever. It is often laugh-out-loud-funny too

A poetic and powerful account of a troubled marriage, sensitive, frank and full of insight into the human condition

Unquestionable is the lucid beauty of Fuller’s prose and her courage in producing it

A trenchant yet riveting examination of what [Alexandra Fuller] calls the “culture” of the end of a marriage

[Fuller] is so compassionate, funny and un-bitter, and her straight-shooting yet graceful prose is the real thing

This fascinating memoir is by turns hilarious and utterly heartbreaking in charting 20 years of marriage… Searingly and disconcertingly honest

Leaving Before the Rains Come is a drama of expatriation, exploring in searching terms…an imagined return of the native. It carries memoir beyond candour towards a place in literature

[A] readable, often hilarious, but always frank account

Fuller writes about making mistakes, living with grief and depression, coping with loss, with incredible insight and honesty. We raced through this book

A powerful, emotionally honest account of a relationship falling apart.

A riveting account of the disintegration of a marriage… Revelatory without ascribing blame.  Fuller writes without bitterness or partiality, illuminating the universal by a powerful illustration of the particular.

The sequel to the bestselling Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight 
 
Born in England and uprooted to southern Africa as a toddler by her parents, Alexandra Fuller experienced a unique upbringing – both coloured with tragedy and joy – against the backdrop of the Rhodesian wars. Following her marriage to American Charlie Ross, she leaves Africa for Wyoming in the United States. This sequel to the bestselling Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight vividly captures the highs, lows and ultimate dissolution of Fuller’s twenty-year marriage and her unbreakable tie to her African past as she searches for explanations for the present and answers for the future. 
 
Interlaced with stories from her childhood in Africa, Fuller paints a brilliant picture of an expatriate’s love for her homeland, a daughter’s acceptance of her father and the moving journey of her marriage and divorce. Poignant, candid and wistfully humorous, Leaving Before the Rains Come will resonate with anyone who has ever fallen out of love – with a person, idea or a place – and into self-acceptance and the belief that only we can save ourselves. 
 
‘Remarkable, beautifully written and fantastically entertaining… a compulsive read’ Observer

Alexandra Fuller

A truly extraordinary memoir about a mother’s loss of her son: beautiful, fearless, raw and an utterly compelling read

Life writers often want to be likeable. Fuller’s not in that camp: rawly bereft, she doesn’t care how she comes across… It’s no easy ride in her company, but that’s the point: she doesn’t spare us the pain inflicted by “the sharp knife of a short life”

A profound and gripping memoir about surviving unexpected, devastating loss

A Memoir of My Son

The story of a mother grieving the sudden loss of her twenty-one-year-old child - from the bestselling memoirist of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight 
 
** Pulitzer Prize Finalist 2025 in Memoir/Autobiography ** 
 
'Truly extraordinary' HELEN MACDONALD 
 
‘A profound and gripping memoir about surviving unexpected, devastating loss’ SUNDAY TIMES 
 
‘A mesmeric celebration... Will help others surviving loss — surviving life' NEW YORK TIMES 
 
It’s midsummer in Wyoming and Alexandra Fuller is barely hanging on. Grieving her father and pining for her home country of Zimbabwe, reeling from a midlife breakup, freshly sober and piecing her way uncertainly through a volatile new relationship with a younger woman, Alexandra vows to get herself back on even keel. 
 
And then – suddenly and incomprehensibly – her son Fi, at twenty-one years old, dies in his sleep. 
 
From a sheep wagon deep in the mountains of Wyoming to a grief sanctuary in New Mexico to a silent meditation retreat in Alberta, Canada, Alexandra journeys up and down the spine of the Rocky Mountains in an attempt to find how to grieve herself whole. By turns disarming, devastating and unexpectedly, blessedly funny, Alexandra recounts the wild medicine of painstakingly grieving a child in a culture that has no instructions for it.

Alexandra Fuller

Praise for Fi

A truly extraordinary memoir about a mother’s loss of her son: beautiful, fearless, raw and an utterly compelling read

Life writers often want to be likeable. Fuller’s not in that camp: rawly bereft, she doesn’t care how she comes across… It’s no easy ride in her company, but that’s the point: she doesn’t spare us the pain in ...

A profound and gripping memoir about surviving unexpected, devastating loss

A truly extraordinary memoir about a mother’s loss of her son: beautiful, fearless, raw and an utterly compelling read

Life writers often want to be likeable. Fuller’s not in that camp: rawly bereft, she doesn’t care how she comes across… It’s no easy ride in her company, but that’s the point: she doesn’t spare us the pain in ...

A profound and gripping memoir about surviving unexpected, devastating loss

A truly extraordinary memoir about a mother’s loss of her son: beautiful, fearless, raw and an utterly compelling read

Life writers often want to be likeable. Fuller’s not in that camp: rawly bereft, she doesn’t care how she comes across… It’s no easy ride in her company, but that’s the point: she doesn’t spare us the pain in ...

A profound and gripping memoir about surviving unexpected, devastating loss

Books by Alexandra Fuller

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