Let's Tell This Story Properly
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
"Men behave badly in these stories, women suffer or negotiate for power, families bicker and try to cooperate. There is Uganda, and there is Britain, and then all the miles in between."—Los Angeles Times
How far does one have to travel to find home elsewhere? The stories in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s collection attempt to measure that distance. Centered around the lives of Ugandans in Britain, Let's Tell This Story Properly features characters both hyper-visible and unseen—they take on jobs at airport security, care for the elderly, and work in hospitals, while remaining excluded from white, British life. As they try to find their place, they drift from a home that feels further and further away. In an ambitious collection by the critically acclaimed author of Kintu, Let's Tell This Story Properly explores what happens to those who leave.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Makumbi (Kintu) captures the struggles of economic uncertainty and assimilation for Ugandans in Britain across decades in this adept collection. In "Our Allies the Colonies," Abbey, an immigrant lured to England during WWII by army recruitment posters, fathers a son with a white woman who puts him up for adoption without informing Abbey. In "Manchester Happened," Nnambassa remembers her difficult immigration to Manchester and the arrival of her 14-year-old sister, Katassi, five years later in 1993. Katassi's teenage entitlement causes a painful estrangement that not even their father's terminal diagnosis decades later can bridge. In the title story, Nnam returns her dead husband's body to Uganda, only to learn he had continued to father children with the wife she thought he had abandoned. In "Love Made in Manchester," 15-year-old Masaaba shocks his British mom and Ugandan father by following through with his online boast about returning to Uganda to take part in the traditional circumcision ceremony. Readers will savor Makumbi's explorations of characters caught between Uganda and England and the cultural forces of immigration, making for a thoughtful, eloquent collection.
