Customer Reviews

Beyond Mombasa

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This a brilliantly written book - up there amongst the better Wilbur Smith books. The writing is rich, the characters well developed, the subject matter material intriguing - it's based on real events - the building of the Uganda railway across the wilds of Kenya in the late 17th century.

It touches on some of the material used in the Val Kilmer/Michael Douglas film "The Ghost and the Darkness" however, while that film merged characters and falsified the relationships that Preston and Patterson and Turk had with their men and the natives to make it fit into a 2 hr film, this novel deals with these pioneers and their first forays into the Afican wilderness with a team of reluctant Indian rail workers. It's them against the elements and themselves, with the deadline of an imminent war, men who simply want to abandon the whole thing and go home (a place many wont see for several years while they are contracted to complete the railway - nor can they afford the passage if they could - to either England or India). It also looks at how Preston's wife survived it all - the only woman in a rail work gang of 4000.

Great story.
Really.