Malaria Dreams (An African Adventure)

Malaria Dreams is a tale of high adventure across Africa, recounted with the wit and humor that delighted readers of Night Train to Turkistan, Stuart Stevens’s highly praised first book.

The story begins when a “geologist” friend mentions to Stevens that he has a Land Rover in the Central African Republic which he’d like to get back to Europe. It’s only later, when Stevens discovers that half of Africa thinks his friend is a spy and the other half is convinced he’s a diamond smuggler, that the intrepid author begins to realize he should have asked a few more questions before leaving home. And then there’s the small problem of the Land Rover’s seizure by the minister of mines, who has appropriated it as his personal car. It is a new Land Rover. The minister likes it very much.

Three months later, Stevens and his twenty-three-year-old companion (the only woman to ever transfer from Bryn Mawr to the University of Oklahoma) have somehow managed to drive "though not in the ill-fated Land Rover" across the wildest part of Africa, emerging scathed but still alive on the shores of the Mediterranean.

Malaria Dreams takes readers along on close encounters with killer ants in Cameroon, revolutionary soldiers in the middle of Lake Chad (a huge mudhole lacking any water), and strangely frenzied Peace Corps parties in Niger. There’s a long search for a functional set of springs in Timbuktu and near-disastrous bouts with sickness and automotive malfunctions in the middle of the Sahara.

Through it all, Stevens and his ex-fashion model companion battle the odds, and often each other, to return home to tell this unlikely, highly amusing tale.