Book description
Three men trek to the remote African interior in search of a lost
friend - and reach, at the end of a perilous journey, an unknown land
cut off from the world, where terrible dangers threaten anyone who
ventures near the spectacular diamond mines of King Solomon...
Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925) was a prolific English writer,
who published colorful novels set in unknown regions and lost kingdoms
of Africa, or some other corner of the world: Iceland, Constantinople,
Mexico, Ancient Egypt. Haggard's best-known work is the romantic
adventure tale KING SOLOMON'S MINES (1885), which was inspired by
Robert Louis Stevenson' s famous Treasure Island.
Giles Foden was born in Warwickshire in 1967. His family moved to
Malawi in 1972 where he was brought up. His first novel, the acclaimed
The Last King of Scotland (1998), is set during Idi Amin's
rule of Uganda in the 1970s and won the Whitbread First Novel Award;
his second novel, Ladysmith (1999), is set during the
Anglo-Boer War in 1899; Zanzibar (2002), is set in East Africa
and explores the events surrounding the bombings of American embassies
in 1998. A new book, The Battle for Lake Tanganyika, was
published in 2004.
