West with the Night by Beryl Markham

Used. Paperback. Before she was outflying the boys across the Atlantic, Beryl Markham was scouting big game from the cockpit, training racehorses, and growing up wild in early twentieth-century East Africa. Her memoir charts a fearless, wind-whipped life on a frontier that didn't know what to do with an independent woman, let alone one who could pilot a plane through a continent's worth of peril. The prose is so breathtakingly sharp and poetic that it famously left Ernest Hemingway feeling like an amateur carpenter with a pen. It is an adventurous, atmospheric classic of early aviation that delivers pure flight, fierce freedom, and some of the finest travel writing you will ever pull off a shelf.