Tommy Goes Home by Peter Stiff

Take Manfred Forster, a tough geologist who as a child fought in the battle for Berlin, was  brought up in communist East Germany, and escaped to the West hours before the Berlin Wall clanked down like an iron curtain. Take his wife Karin, their teenage sons Frank and Uwe and their eight-year-old daughter Gabriella. Toss them, together with dogs, parrots, assorted livestock and a half grown lion called Tommy, into a Land-Rover with 100 000km  on the clock, and convoy it with a beaten up old Volksie. Send them overland from West  Germany, through Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, Angola, Zambia and Botswana to the then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). During their journey Portugal erupts into military and civil rebellion and Angola is wrenched apart by tribal and Marxist private armies scrambling  for the spoils of their late colonial masters — what happens is the essence of Peter Stiff’s fantastic second book — soon to be a motion picture.

 

.........