Perhaps not his most exciting work by far when compared to his other books about the Dark Continent, this book took some getting into. I am a huge fan of Haggard and so I read it through to the end, enjoying the language and art of the man who wrote it. I will most likely not revisit it again, thoug

I love Rider Haggard. I started the Allan Quatermain series with King Solomon's Mines and followed through until he was killed off. Thankfully when the books were being written, Haggard realized he had a great character that he had just murdered, so he wrote the prequels. This is one of those. It te

Allan's Wife is set early in the chronology of Haggard's heroic great white hunter, with sequences set in his English childhood and his earliest years in Africa. There are some racist/imperialistic prejudices and attitudes that will offend people who don't stop to think that it's for a book written

In a review that I gave earlier in 2022, I relayed how I came to acquire a 60-plus novel compendium of Sir Henry Rider Haggard books and how my intention is to read as many of these as I can, expecting to read them over the course of several years. This is my second review of an Allan Quartermain wo

I am working my way through the Allan Quatermain books, and have finished King Solomon's Mines, which was the best so far, as well as Allan Quatermain, which had an interesting Lost World premise, but was just too wordy at 312 pages for the story it told. Allan's Wife is the third in the series, and

Smaller in scope than King Solomon's Mines/Allan Quatermain, and better for it. A more intimate, simple story. The character of Hendrika may well be more fascinating than that of Gagool.

Probably closer to a 3.5.

So H. Rider Haggard had a bit of a Reichenbach Falls problem ... In 1885, in his (fabulously successful) novel King Solomon's Mines, he had created Allan Quatermain, an English hunter who'd spent most of his life wandering the wilds of Africa before being recruited to join t

Another fine installment in the adventures of Allan Quatermain.

And once again, the most interesting character is the native African Allan pals around with. This time it's Indaba-zimbi.

I'm working my way through the Quatermain tales in order of publication. If this one is any indication, they're going to get progressively stranger. Haggard has gone from a 'lost' African tribe (King Solomon's Mines), to a lost 'white' tribe (Allan Quatermain) to this tale of a rediscovered, abandon