![]() ![]() From the scornful teenagers whose ‘eyes were slaughter’ and the wealthy student ‘driven everywhere as if he had no legs’ to the neighbour so forbidding that ‘if you saw her coming while you peed by the roadside, you sat down in your pee and smiled’, the characters in this novel leap off the page by virtue of its author’s vibrant writing.įunny but never caricatured, they reveal multiple sides as the plot plays out. There is an extraordinary directness to her descriptions that at times had me gnawing my fists with envy at her talent. Drawing on Ganda oral storytelling traditions and myths, her prose shimmers with energy, urgency and fun. Nansubuga Makumbi is an exceptional writer. ![]() From the moment, I started The First Woman, I was hooked into the coming-of-age story of Kirabo, a girl struggling to find a sense of self in the turbulent years during and following Idi Amin’s dictatorship. Having read such a book as my original choice for Uganda back in 2012, I suppose I felt no hurry to read another novel in a similar vein. The fact that it has taken me so long to get her is probably due to fact that her novels are often talked about as sagas that deal with national history. She was the winner of the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and her debut novel, Kintu, has been widely praised. The author of my latest book of the month has been on my radar for a number of years. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |