Her Guns

Jeremy Harding

• The View from the Ground by Martha Gellhorn
  Granta, 459 pp, £14.95, September 1989, ISBN 0 14 014200 2
• Towards Asmara by Thomas Keneally
  Hodder, 320 pp, £12.95, September 1989, ISBN 0 340 41517 7

As a young girl growing up in St Louis, Missouri, Martha Gellhorn had a habit of poring over maps; riding on the city’s tramcars, she would imagine she was bound for distant places with exotic names. Seventy years later, her war dispatches, fiction, travel writing and the peacetime journalism – collected here – bear witness to a lifetime of wanderlust. From the clattering cars of the St Louis Transit Authority, the dreamy child has disembarked as a grown woman in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa. In all these places she has set down what she saw in her journalism and worked what was less readily apparent into her fiction: five novels, two collections of stories and four groups of novellas.