A friend says these are her two favorite books

Out of Africa ~ by Isak Dinesen, 1937, nonfiction, 416 pages

In this book, the author of Seven Gothic Tales gives a true account of her life on her plantation in Kenya.  She tells with classic sim-plicity of the ways of the country and the natives, of the beauty of the Ngong Hills and coffee trees in blossom, of her guests, from the Prince of Wales to Knudsen, the old charcoal burner, who visited her, of primitive festivals, of big game that were her near neighbors — lions, rhinos, elephants, zebras, buffaloes — and of Lulu, the little gazelle who came to live with her, unbelievably ladylike and beautiful.

A Gentleman in Moscow ~ by Amor Towles, 2019, political fiction, 496 pages

The #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway and Table for Two wrote this novel about a man who's ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel.

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin.  Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors.  Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery, and the count endeavors to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.