Sanctuary from sexual abuse

What we need," wrote Franz Kafka, "are books that affect us like some grievous misfortune, like the death of one whom we loved more than ourselves." Carolyn Slaughter's Before the Knife - a memoir of growing up in Africa, of a transcendent landscape and a family destroyed by unacknowledged abuse - is such a book.

Slaughter was born in India but grew up in Swaziland and Botswana, one of three daughters of a colonial district commissioner and a mother whose "only accomplishment" was her beauty. Her father, the son of a policeman born into poverty in Ireland in 1914 - and who'd "found in this remote but exquisite satellite of the British Empire a place to exercise a deep need for power" - first raped her when she was six years old. By the time she was eight, she was fantasising daily about killing him.

Lost in self-hatred, her only sanctuary was nature and - later at boarding school - an older girl who was self-possessed enough to offer Slaughter comfort without judgment. With a mother who refused to help her, and an elder sister, Angela, in desperate denial, Slaughter clung to anyone who offered love. One long summer, with their parents away in England, Slaughter and Angela stayed with an ebullient Afrikaner family: a two-month respite from the hell of their own nuclear unit.

Amid the blazing descriptions of Africa - a landscape she loved "with a passion that came close to religious ecstasy" - there is hard-earned wisdom here. Slaughter, who suspended her novelistic career 10 years ago to become a psychotherapist, has a deep and compassionate understanding of the way that interior damage can jeopardise everything, how near-impossible it makes friendships or any kind of trust. Many years later, she finally dared speak to her sister about what had happened. Acknowledging it, Angela told her: "You were always willing to go down into the dark without a candle." Slaughter's bravery has resulted in a book so searing and powerful that words cannot easily do it justice. It must, simply, be read.

Alexandra Fuller's memoir is also of an African childhood, though the pain of her story thankfully owes nothing to parental abuse. Her mother and father - despite being knocked by the death of children, by the everyday terror of the civil war in their home country of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe - are remembered with fondness by Fuller, the younger of two daughters.

Her childhood, like that of Slaughter, was peripatetic, and Fuller, too, writes powerfully of the visceral pull of the African landscape. Her writing works on many different levels: she has a natural gift for comedy and dialogue, and when grief tears the family apart, she never resorts to hyperbole.

It was, by any standard, an uncommon upbringing. Before the age of 10, she'd learned to shoot an Uzi. When Zimbabwean soldiers - representatives of the first black government - enter their family kitchen, her sister Vanessa doesn't look up from her cakebaking. "It says 40 minutes in a medium oven," she says, the guns trained on her. No finishing school could ever teach that level of sang-froid.