Reserved, honourable Mr Malik. But, beneath his unprepossessing exterior lies a warm heart and a secret passion. While Mr Malik hesitantly plans how he will ask Rose to the annual Hunt Ball, flashy Harry Kahn arrives in town and makes it clear that he too has Rose in his sights.
Reserved, honourable Mr Malik. You wouldn't notice him in a Nairobi street - except, perhaps, to comment on his carefully sculpted comb over - but beneath his unprepossessing exterior lies a warm heart and a secret passion. Not even his friends at the Asadi Club know it, but Mr Malik is head-over-heels in love with the leader of the Tuesday morning bird walk of the East African Ornithological Society, Rose Mbikwa. While Mr Malik hesitantly plans how he will ask Rose to the annual Hunt Ball, flashy Harry Kahn arrives in town and makes it clear that he too has Rose in his sights.When Mr Malik blurts out his feelings at the Club a wager is set - whoever sees the most birds in a week will ask Rose to the ball. With boats, planes and guides to get him to the choicest bird-watching spots in Kenya, Harry Kahn's soon noting down everything from pearl-breasted swallows to spur-winged plovers. But, Mr Malik's not so easily beaten and with unorthodox methods and far-flung adventures of his own, he's determined to stay in the game.
Author info:
Nicholas Drayson was born in England and has lived in Australia since 1982, where he studied zoology and a PhD in 19th century Australian natural history writing. He has worked as a journalist in the UK, Kenya and Australia, writing for publications such as the Daily Telegraph and Australian Geographic. From 1998 to 2001 he wrote for the National Museum of Australia. His first novel, Confessing a Murder, was published in 2002. He was recently the winner of the inaugural WILDCARE Tasmania Nature Writing Prize.
Kirkus review:
A lighthearted novel about birding and a wager to win the right to call a woman for a date.The story is set in Nigeria, where former Nairobi resident Drayson (Confessing a Murder, 2002) introduces us to Mr. Malik, a shy widower whose son recently died of AIDS. As a way of having at least some semblance of a social life, he's been going on weekly excursions with the local birding club, led by the attractive Rose Mbikwa. Shortly before the big social event of the year, the Nairobi Hunt Club Ball, the brash but charming Harry Khan shows up. In their school days more than 40 years earlier he had bullied Mr. Malik, and now he seems determined to best him again by courting Rose. Because both men are interested in inviting her to the ball, they decide on a gentleman's bet, to be adjudicated by members of the Nairobi Asadi Club. The wager is for the right to invite Rose to the ball, a right that will be given to whoever identifies the greatest number of birds in one week. While he knows far more about womanizing than about birding, Harry wastes no time lining up a couple of ornithologically astute Australian tourists to help him out, and because Harry is both rich and competitive, he has no qualms in pulling out all the stops - hiring a plane to take him to Mount Kenya, for example, to augment his week's list. Meanwhile, for Mr. Malik things go painfully and comically awry. His car is stolen, which makes traveling beyond the bounds of Nairobi a serious problem, and after he recovers the car he's held up by machine-gun-toting bandits. With less than 24 hours to go he finds himself down by one, with 198 species to Harry's 199.A sweet novel in which the reader gets surprisingly caught up in fairly frivolous events. (Kirkus Reviews)
