The Setting Sun

Starred review from March 15, 2014
One day, London University English professor Moore-Gilbert is in his office, reading an e-mail asking about a person who might be related to him. In just months, Moore-Gilbert is in India, tracing the past of his father, Bill, a game warden in Africa who died young in a plane crash, a man Moore-Gilbert barely knew but clearly remembers. Once in India, Moore-Gilbert finds clues in tattered reports and interviews with elderly acquaintances of his father that begin to bring to life a person very different from the one he remembers. Born in Tanzania, Moore-Gilbert had an unusual childhood, and his youthful memories are scattered throughout the book, as are almost show-stopping photographs of Moore-Gilbert with Kimwaga, his beloved minder, who is holding a hyena cub, and of Bill, his father, wearing a pith helmet and standing just behind a massive, freshly dead tiger. Moore-Gilbert bravely moves forward with his search in India, though what he finds shakes him. Was his father, in India from 1938 to 1947 and a member of the Indian police, a terrorist? Was he a womanizer? Moore-Gilbert, who feels he is becoming a detective like his father once was, states, I made the decision to find out the truth, however painful or inconvenient it might be. Touching and evocative and depicting India's turbulent past and present, this is an enthralling son-and-father memoir.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)