We are all birds of Uganda by Hafsa Zayyan

Published: Penguin, 2021

Genre: Fiction

Themes: Ugandan Asians, family business, family dynasty

My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤❤❤

This made me consider how much our lives can be influenced by those who came before us. Decisions made by parents and grandparents can influence where we live; our moral boundaries; and how we view, and inwardly judge, others. Even if we decide to do everything differently, there are times in our lives where we feel the pull of the family compass and all we want to do is to return to a familiar path.

This is a debut novel and I struggle to understand how anyone can write so well at such a young age. Hafsa Zayyan must be under 30 as this book won the Merky Book Prize and that is only open to people aged 16 - 30. Apparently she wrote the whole thing in 6 months while continuing to work as a dispute resolution lawyer, and she is writing convincingly about a totally different culture to her own.

The book is set in the present and follows Sameer who is a young Asian man working as a lawyer in London. His family came to live in Leicester after Idi Amin declared that the Asians must all leave the country in 1972 and all their business interests were seized by the state. Despite the horrors of that time, some of the older generation remember their life in Uganda fondly and some have since returned to start again.

Before the expulsion, the Asian businesses were thriving and the workforce was drawn from the Ugandan African population but their employers did not allow them to take shares in the companies or marry into their families. Once the Asian families arrived in England they found themselves on the receiving end of racial discrimination, so we see how prejudice works in different cultural settings.

Throughout the book there are glimpses into Sameer's family's past life in Uganda through a series of letters that Sameer's grandfather wrote to his first wife. I was very impressed by the way the author captures the different ways of thinking across the generations, and her writing always allows us to understand even if we must disagree. The story is well constructed with a perfect thread of the past running through the present and the characters are beautifully observed. If you enjoyed reading American Marriage by Tayari Jones then I am pretty sure you would enjoy this one.

Comments

Violeta by Isabel Allende

Published: 2022, Bloomsbury Genre: Fiction Themes: South America, family relationships, business My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤❤ If I ever tell my life story, I will take a leaf out of Violeta's book and make sure you understand that everybody loved me, and despite all sorts of questionable behaviour on my part, I leave the world as a winner. This is the story of a hundred year life. Violeta is approaching the end, but before she goes she is determined to write out her life story for someone she loves dearly. You don't get to know who that special someone is for most of the book, but that just serves to give the narrative a little twist. I didn't much like the character of Violeta but I understand that people who don't go round upsetting the apple cart don't make for very interesting stories. With such a great time span to play with, Isabel Allende had plenty of scope for changing Violeta's circumstances and adding in references to world events to keep the reader...

Holding by Graham Norton

Published: October 2016, Hodder and Stoughton Genre: fiction Themes: Ireland, crime, secrets, relationships, family My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤ I went into the library looking for a book by Graham Norton as I keep seeing positive comments about his books on Twitter, and I felt I might be missing something. Holding seems to be his first book, and the library copy has a Radio 2 Book Club sticker on it, and I think it's fair to say that it's a perfect book for that reading group. It's a chatty style of writing that I could imagine would be how Graham would recount a tale if he was in conversation with someone, and there are sufficient strong elements to the plot-line to keep it interesting to the end. When I first started reading I thought it was going to be a bit thin on plot, as much of the story involved character descriptions, and I was starting to wonder how it was going to pull together. Then the dramatic events began to unfold and, once I could see how everyon...

The Wolf Den by Elodie Harper

Publisher: Head of Zeus, 2021 Genre: Fiction Themes: Ancient Pompeii, slaves, brothel My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤❤ If, like me, you spent most of your history lessons looking out the window and didn't really absorb very much about the ancient Roman Empire, nil desperandum, as you will still manage perfectly well with this book. Set in first century Pompeii, the story follows the life of Amara, a young Greek woman who has been shipped to Pompeii as a slave and then bought by the owner of The Wolf Den brothel. As the daughter of a doctor, she was bought up in relatively comfortable circumstances, but a series of terrible events turned her life upside down and she is now trapped in an endless cycle of fear and degradation with almost no hope of escape. Amara is one of a group of slaves working in the Wolf Den, and they do what they can to protect one another from serious harm, but Amara knows that if she wants anything better for herself, she must make the brothel ow...

dittybox

Search This Blog