Lucilla Andrews

[from inner dust jacket flap] It's summer 1955 and three people who were wartime friends are appalled to find they are fellow travelers on a small, old British passenger liner on the ten-week round-Africa run. Elinor Mackenzie is in tourist class. She was twenty-two when she was widowed during the war, but now, thirty-three, she is determined to start a fresh life for herself. In first class is Dr. Paddy Brown, sailing round Africa to convalesce from the polio that has pole-axed his intended marriage and his soaring medical career. George Ashden, ex-GP., is traveling to a new job in Rhodesia. Recently widowed, he is still haunted by his unhappy marriage -- and the memory of Elinor in 1945.

It is only in the Suez Canal that Paddy finally discovers the secret which Elinor has known since Genoa. And in the burning heat of the un-airconditioned ship in the Red Sea his action forces the three old friends into the inescapable proximity of passengers in the same class.

Swinging between two vanished worlds: daylightless, bombed, wartime London and the brilliantly sunlit decks of the liner and its exotic ports of call, The Africa Run is a most engrossing, memorable and evocative love story.