I did wonder whether it was a problem with the translation but as far as I can tell from the title page, the book was written in English. And it’s part of a generally over-written, shouty kind of tone the book has which I just didn’t get on with sometimes I’d get into it and be quite absorbed for twenty or thirty pages, and then some turn of phrase would snap me out of it again. These similes are sometimes quite good in themselves - he describes a priest at the seminary as having ‘an ego as large as a cirrhotic liver’ - but I found the overall effect distracting. Quite apart from a tendency to cliché, it seems like Isegawa reacts to similes the way a small child reacts to candy. And lots of striking incidents and some strong (though not generally very likeable) characters.ĭespite which, after reading a hundred pages, I checked to see how long the book was and had a sinking feeling when I saw there were still 400 pages to go. The central character is initially brought up in a village before moving to Kampala, is from a Catholic background and is educated in a rather brutal seminary his grandmother is a midwife he ends up leaving Uganda to move to Holland. The good stuff first: it’s a story that traces a couple of generations through the history of modern Uganda, with the arrival of Idi Amin and the collapse of his regime, the sequence of messy guerilla wars, the rise of AIDS and so on. Which is a bit of a relief, because I found it quite hard work.

I’ve just finished Abyssinian Chronicles.

Abyssinian Chronicles by Moses Isegawa