Description
Manoli Makris, a 14 year-old stowaway from the island of Crete, arrives in turn-of-the-century colonial East Africa. Before he is thirty he is master of a large fortune, making him the most eligible bachelor in the colony. In the small tropical coastal town of Tanga social life revolves around the Africa Hotel where an illegal backroom gambling den is to play a decisive role after Manoli meets Andrea, the stunning blonde daughter of an impoverished German count and countess. Andrea has a dark and hidden passion. More complications set in with the arrival of Manoli's new plantation manager, Steve Perry, from California, with his wife and mature 17 year-old daughter, Tina. In Kenya, near Lake Victoria, Manoli establishes a vast sugar plantation at Songhor that becomes the centre of his expanding business empire. Absorbed in their lives, Manoli and the other European settlers in Kenya miss the warning signs of African discontent with British rule and the Mau Mau revolt breaks out. When Manoli's son, Alexander, is asked for help in London by an African tribal leader, a childhood Songhor friend, he follows a dangerous path through the shady world of international arms dealers, secretive bankers, and offshore money havens and arms factories. A family scandal and a murder in Kenya's European high society puts the Makris family once again in the limelight as world attention centres on the court case that is about to begin in Nairobi. Songhor is a page-turning story of passionate love affairs, great fortunes made and lost, dangerous encounters on safari with big game and the dramas and triumphs of three generations of the protagonist's family against a backdrop of war and political rivalry in British colonial, Emergency, and post-independence Africa.
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