Getting malaria sucks. It especially sucks when you've taken all suggested precautions: swallowing blue Doxycycline pills with tea each morning, sleeping under a claustrophobic white net each night, and slathering yourself in lethal-smelling DEET repellant as though it were coconut body butter.

It sucks tenfold when you are in one of the most intriguing locations of your African travels, a stretch of land three kilometers from shore called Ilha de Mocambique (Mozambique Island), where crumbling colonial buildings in shades of peach and pink stand feet from the turquoise Indian Ocean. Instead of walking those dusty streets with children rolling tires—a great game for children all over Africa, it seems—I am lying on my back in bed, listening to the deafening Ramadan call to prayer coming from a nearby green mosque.

My head pulses with each Arabic word, my temples sore to the touch. My body aches and my joints feel creaky. I haven't been able to keep food down for days.

I sort of want to die.

But more than I want to die, I want to be out seeing Ilha de Mocambique—traipsing through the old fort at the north end of the island, admiring the original furniture in the former governor's mansion, saying hello to school children anxious to practice their English with the mzungus. After paying 50 meticais ($2) to have a blood test in the island's only clinic—a dark, concrete place where most people sat outside in the dirt, coughing and moaning—and then being told that yes, the test was positive, few other instructions followed. In Mozambique, where life expectancy hovers somewhere around 37 years and most people are inflicted with malaria at least once a year, they shrug their shoulders and say to find a pharmacy with a strong drug called Arinate.

Yes, I keep saying. But what else?

When pressed like this, they murmur that I should rest, drink liquids, stay out of the sun. And so I rest. I try to drink liquids, but it's difficult with the throat infection I've also acquired, a gumball-size lump behind my tongue. The first few days are hellish, but by the fourth or fifth day, sulking is my worst symptom. I feel human again, but am still too weak to get off the couch in my hostel for more than an hour at a time. I picture all the things I am missing, places I may never have a chance to visit again, and press my travel companion (she's from Whidbey Island) for details when she returns from an afternoon out.

This, basically, is how I come to read Alexandra Fuller's Scribbling the Cat. I picked it up in a bookstore in Dar es Salaam—a proper bookstore with English-language books, a rare commodity in this part of the world. I had spent nearly an hour carefully selecting several books (imported from Europe, each paperback nearly $20) and stored them in the bottom of my backpack.

Scribbling the Cat, a New York Times best-seller, is the true tale of an ex-Rhodesian soldier and an African writer journeying together into the lands of the Zimbabwe/Rhodesia civil war. I figured if I couldn't be out there experiencing it all myself, I might as well read about it. Fuller, whose first book was a memoir about her upbringing in Africa, ventures out on a road trip through Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. Her companion is K, a character so emotionally wounded by his experience as a soldier that the scars crisscrossing his flesh might as well be evidence of the son he lost or the women he tortured, not the remnants of a long and bizarre African war. The book is about his years in the Rhodesian Light Infantry and the damage he inflicted and endured. It is also about his relationship with Fuller, about the answers they are searching for within one another: Each wants to know how it was possible to participate in such an ugly event, Fuller as an observer and K as a soldier. K's car becomes a kind of confessional, with Fuller listening to the gruesome details of K's sins, both believing that this act, and the journey itself, will heal old wounds. It doesn't. Instead, it seems to rip them open.

"By the end of this," Fuller writes, "there were pieces of me and pieces of him and pieces of our history that were barbed together in a tangle in my head and I couldn't shake the feeling that in some inevitable way, I was responsible for K and he for me."

Although malarial while reading it, I found it marvelous. Fuller writes richly about her characters and the stunning African landscape, weaving in observations of crushing poverty and blatant injustices—all of which have been part of my own African experience.