BOYD, William. A Good Man in Africa. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981.
8vo. Original fawn boards, backstrip gilt; pictorial dust-jacket with illustration by Michael MacManus; pp. [x], 11-251, [v]; a near-fine example, with slight lean and pushing to spine ends; in like pictorial jacket perhaps a tad creased around the edges, and sunned to the spine.
First edition of the author's first novel.
Boyd grew up in Western Africa, living in both Ghana and Nigeria. He claims that the novel "is completely set in Ibadan in Western Nigeria even though I changed the names, but everybody in it is made up. It’s rooted in my autobiography in terms of its colour, texture and smells but the story is – and that’s something that’s always been the case with me - invented. There is an autobiographical element in that the character of Dr Murray is very much a two-dimensional portrait of my father." The book won both the Whitbread Book Award for a first novel and the Somerset Maugham Award in the year of publication.
"It is as though Lucky Jim had been suddenly transported to the mythical kingdom of Azania in Black Mischief." (The New York Times).
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