Mona McAlpine's best-selling memoir of her time as the only nurse on Fair Isle, Britain's most remote inhabited island, was just the start of an incredible career. She left her native Shetland Isles in 1969 to begin a thirty year adventure, nursing in South Africa at its most turbulent.
As a midwife in the township of Soweto, she encountered tragedy and comedy, as well as the triumph of the human spirit. Working in hospitals in Johannesburg, she was an eyewitness to one of South Africa's biggest and most heart-rending crimes, before meeting the great and the good of the country, including the late President Nelson Mandela.
After three decades, she decided to return to her home on the Old Rock: Shetland.
In A Shetland Midwife in Africa, Mona tells her story with great verve and warmth. It will inspire, move and evoke strong emotions, from laughter to tears, as it captures life in South Africa as everything in that country changed. |
