Too Close To The Sun

The Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton

Sara Wheeler

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A brilliant new biography by the acclaimed author of CHERRY and TERRA INCOGNITA.

Conservationist, scholar, soldier, white hunter and fabled lover – Denys Finch Hatton was an aristocrat of leonine nonchalance. After a dazzling career at Eton and Oxford, he sailed in 1910 for British East Africa. There he first had an affair with the glamorous aviatrix Beryl Markham, and then – famously – with Karen Blixen, a romance immortalised in her memoir Out of Africa. 'No one who ever met him,’ his Times obituary concluded, ‘whether man or woman, old or young, white or black, failed to come under his spell.’
TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN is a story of big guns and small planes, princes from England and sultans from Zanzibar, marauding lions, syphilis, self-destruction and the tragedy of the human heart. Sara Wheeler tracks her quarry from a dreamlike Edwardian childhood in a Lincolnshire mansion through to the battlefields of the East African campaign – one of the last remaining untold stories of the First World War. An elusive hero in the mythic story of the British settlers in East Africa, Finch Hatton was the open road made flesh, and Wheeler uses his biography to illuminate a generation.

Published: 1 July 2010
ISBN: 9781407052786
Imprint: Vintage Digital
Format: EBook
Pages: 304

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Biography

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About the author

Sara Wheeler

Sara Wheeler’s books include the international bestseller Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, of which the Telegraph reviewer wrote, ‘I do not think there will ever be a better book on the Antarctic.’ The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle, was chosen as Book of the Year by Will Self, Michael Palin, A. N. Wilson and others. She has published two biographies of travellers: Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, and Too Close to the Sun: The Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton, and was immensely relieved to write about women at last in O My America!. She lives in London.

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Praise for Too Close To The Sun

A good story... a fitting memorial
Observer

A fascinating story of a man trying to outrun the social upheavals of the twentieth century
Herald

Wheeler has made excellent use of the sources at hand... Moreover, Wheeler writes well, and has a gift - shared by only very few - for pinning down the smells and atmosphere of the African landscape
Literary Review

She dazzles the reader with an evocation of time and place.. her description of the east Africa Campaign is detailed and enthralling
Keith Dovkants, Scotsman