I Was Never Here and This Never Happened: Tasty Bits and Spicy Tales from My Life

Hafner's cooking show, A Taste of Africa (already popular in Australia and the U.K.), is set to debut in the U.S. this fall, and if this chatty, utterly engaging book is any indication, it will be a huge hit. This Ghanaian native uses a lighthearted manner to tackle serious subjects. She combines autobiography, recipes, folk stories, songs and photographs to make her points. As an African woman living in Australia, Hafner offers a rare viewpoint. She devotes chapters to both her father, who suffered through her earliest attempts at cooking on a toy stove, and to her stricter mother, who ran a maternity hospital where she tried to combat clitoridectomy. Tales of Hafner's education, first in the sixth grade, where she saw her teacher killed by a grenade, and then in boarding schools, where she was taught the fine arts of soup-sipping and handkerchief-dropping in etiquette class, are illuminating. But then so are her descriptions of the culture shock she experienced when she left Ghana to study ophthalmic nursing in England. With typical humor, she recalls traveling to the local Marks and Spencer one day to purchase the ""flesh-colored underwear"" she had seen advertised, only to be stumped by the bins of salmon-pink lingerie. After marrying a British doctor, Hafner moved to Australia with him, but found the expected behavior of doctors' wives in direct contrast to her matrilineal background. Never less than spunky, when Hafner was prodded to give a dinner party, she refused to fulfill expectations for an African meal and instead provided a seven-course French menu. And she is no less inspired and appealing when speaking out against racism. Although she concedes that ignorance ""wears you down"" she never shows signs of fatigue. (May)