West with the Night

Brought to Kenya as a four-year-old, Beryl Markham grew up there among the local people and the wild animals that more than once nearly killed her. In this memoir she recounts her careers as a racehorse trainer, one of whose horses won Kenya's most prestigious race, and as a bush pilot, after Denys Finch Hatton took her flying and she became the first woman in Kenya to earn a commercial pilot's licence. She also describes her 1936 attempt to fly solo and non-stop across the Atlantic from east to west, against the prevailing winds, which ended in a crash landing in Nova Scotia. On first publication in 1942 it reached thirteen best seller lists.

Author Cal Fussman named it in Tools of Titans as the book he would give to every graduating female high school senior.