Brazzaville Beach

Brazzaville Beach is a novel by William Boyd, for which he was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 1990, and the McVitie's Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year. The book tells the story of a woman, Hope Clearwater, researching chimpanzees, and the circumstances that brought her to Africa. It is Boyd's first novel with a female protagonist and the first to be written, at least in part, from a first person female perspective. Boyd said that rather than try to consider how a woman, as opposed to a man, would respond to certain situations he focused on developing and understanding Hope's character and personality.