MOSES ISEGAWA

Set in a tribal village during the years of the Idi Amin terror in Uganda, Abyssinian Chronicles takes us into the heart of Africa, vividly immersing us in the mesmerizing extremes of beauty and brutality, wisdom and ignorance, wealth and poverty, hope and despair that define the continent today. We come to intimately know an extended family rich in centuries-old tradition, and follow the unsentimental education of the boy who takes it all in, who learns, observes and teaches, and starts to feel the very earth moving under the African experience and the people he loves. Filled with extraordinary characters, animated by a wicked sense of humour and guided by intense, clear-eyed compassion, this novel feels at once classic and unique. As Rushdies Midnights Children was for modern India, Abyssinian Chronicles will likely prove to be a breakthrough book for Uganda Time Out US A spectacular first novel. Epic, sprawling, brimming with life and death Elle US

Every once in a while there emerges a literary voice with the power and urgency to immerse readers deep within a previously "invisible" culture. From a young African writer who has already earned comparisons to Salman Rushdie and Gabriel Garcia Marquez comes this masterful saga of life in 20th-century Uganda.The teller of this panoramic tale is Mugezi, a quick-witted, sharp-eyed man whose life encompasses the traditional and the modern, the peaceful and the insanely violent, the despotic and the democratic. Born in a rural community in the early 1960s, he is raised by his grandfather, a deposed clan chief, and his great-aunt, or "grandmother," after his parents immigrate to the capital city of Kampala. At age nine, he leaves behind his secure life in the village to join his parents and siblings in the city, where he is first exposed to the despotism and hardship that he will contend with in the years to come.The nightmare reign of Idi Amin and its chaotic aftermath are the backdrop to Mugezis troubled coming-of-age: his constant struggle with his harsh mother and austere father; his years spent as caregiver to his parents ever-growing brood of children; his sojourn in a horrifically repressive Catholic seminary. He goes to work as a high school teacher, becomes enmeshed in a tragic romance, finds himself drawn into a dubious, potentially dangerous alliance with the military after Amins fall and witnesses the widespread ravages of the AIDS virus. Finally, sickened by personal loss and national tragedy, he manages to immigrate to Amsterdam.The details of Mugezis life provide a foundation for Isegawas brilliant and profoundly illuminating portrait of the contemporary, postcolonial African experience. Filled with extraordinary characters, animated by a wicked sense of humor and guided by an intense yet clear-eyed compassion, Abyssianian Chronicles is our introduction to a superlative new writer.

Praised on both sides of the Atlantic as well as in the authors native Uganda, Moses Isegawas first novel Abyssinian Chronicles was a big, transcendently ambitious book (Boston Globe) that blasts open the tidy borders of the conventional novel and redraws the literary map to reveal a whole new world (Elle).In Snakepit, Isegawa returns to the surreal, brutalizing landscapes of his homeland during the time of dictator Idi Amin, when interlocking webs of emotional cruelty kept tyrants gratified and servants cooperative, a land where no onenot husbands or wives, parents or loversis ever safe from the implacable desires of men in power. Men like General Bazooka, who rues the day he hired Cambridge-educated Bat Katanga as his Bureaucrat Twoa man too good at his joband places in his midst (and his bed) a seductive operative named Victoria, whose mission and motives are anything but simple. Ambitious and acquisitive, more than a little arrogant, Katanga finds himself steadily boxed in by events spiraling madly out of control, where deception, extortion, and murder are just so many cards to be played.