Here are some comments from people who received advance copies of Chipman’s African Adventure.
Jim Anderson and Valentine Press value feedback from readers. Please use the form below to make your own comment.
The set-up is perfect: it’s 1972, a bunch of hippies & misfits are living in and around a ramshackle hotel on the beach in tropical Africa. The counter-cultural detail is funny and deeply authentic – Jim Anderson was at the centre of London’s sixties counter-culture. The story-telling is terrific: shades of Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief and Tom Sharpe. Makes you think too. Barry Miles, author, definitive biographer of the beat/hippy generation and sixties counter culture.
Jim Anderson’s new novel is an epic of rootlessness and the search for certainty – it has swung me round and flung me out of the window into a freakish, comedic free-fall. Its message seems to be: in the modern world the only anchor is truth to self – but I’m not sure. Duncan Fallowell, novelist, travel writer, critic.
An exuberant, rollicking narrative spiked with sex, drugs, and a thoroughly wicked wit. Graeme Aitken, author of Vanity Fierce.
Jim Anderson’s Chipman’s African Adventure is the ideal gift for all those who lived through the sixties and seventies but can’t remember anything about them. And an eye-opener for those who weren’t there but wish they had been. A splendid psychedelic flashback of all that weird and wonderful sex and drugs and therapy and the rest of it, before the shades of political correctness rolled in and tried to shut it all down. Michael Wilding, author and Emeritus Professor, English & Australian Literature, University of Sydney.
Outrageous, bizarre, tender and revealing, this close-up encounter with one man’s sixties-style coming out carries the high shockability count of satire. It is moving and hilarious, witty and unscrupulous, lusty and confrontational, a dramatic journey of self-discovery that throws off moralistic sensibilities, strips bare polymorphous desires, and lets a new man emerge from the rubble of his deconstructed ego. Marsha Rowe, founder of Spare Rib.
Nancy Mitford gave us Love in a Cold Climate, and now Jim Anderson has given us love – and its complications — in a hot climate. No-one will ever be able to view Africa in the same light again. Garry Wotherspoon, historian and gay activist.
What unremitting hilarity! Can’t wait for the movie. Sylvia Lawson, film critic, poet and author.
by 
Hi Jim,
I just read the 1st chapter of Chipman’s African Adventure. Quite entertaining. I was actually looking for myself in the book, but was probably included in “sundry hippie dreck.” I was only 21, after all. I was the redheaded friend of Adam Lisowski’s, the crazy polish Viennese fellow. My aunt visited from the US and we made a trip up to Lawra to film the harvest festival. Do you remember the steering wheel that emitted electric shocks?
I, too, wrote a novel entitled “Busua Pleasure Beach,” in the 1990’s, then 2 more historical novels set in Germany. Right after my life in Africa, I met Hans Fruechtenicht, a German musician, who lived in Berlin. We have 3 children and 4 grandchildren and are still in love. Amazing. They are in LA, San Francisco and Ann Arbor, Michigan. It did my heart good to see you are alive and writing. My dear Aunt Jimmie was killed in an auto accident several years after visiting me in Africa. She was a beautiful soul.
Anyway, I don’t know if you remember me,
It was, after all, the seventies!
All the best,
Kathy Beaman Fruechtenicht
A major comic achievement beautifully, exuberantly, hyperactively written. Chipman Smith is a not-quite-innocent abroad looking for love during the last demented days of hippie idealism and excess, in an already corrupted post-colonial Africa. And he’s gay, when that was not an easy thing to be. What could go wrong?
Pretty much everything. Our heart goes out to Chipman. We want him to be happy. We cheer him on and applaud his triumphant if sometimes drugged and drunken transformation into Chippo Cherrynose, a blushing artful dodger who survives one disaster after another.
Embrace this book as Chipman himself reaches out to embrace the confusing and exciting world around him.
Having now read Jim Anderson’s most entertaining novel, Chipman’s African Adventure, I recommend it as a fabulous read. Chippo’s self-effacing, and seemingly innocent, humour is in fact a brilliantly observed tale of psychedelic adventures amongst a bizarre, bohemian brigade at loose on the African coast. It is a coming out while going out of your head story that builds to an intense finale. Jim Anderson is a gifted writer who knows how to lure us into this strange Okidoki world.
Brilliant. Such a wordsmith. I’ve just finished Chipman’s African Adventure and I’m about to read it again. It really got me in. And so entertaining. I couldn’t stop smiling at the numerous witty allusions. The characters were amazing. All so vivid. Highly recommended.