This epic about Uganda’s history from a debut author who grew up in the country and now lives in Manchester starts with a man beaten to death outside Kampala in 2004. Then we wind back to the mid-18th century to watch his distant ancestor, a tribal leader named Kintu, accidentally kill his adoptive son while on an expedition to pledge fealty to a new king. Kintu’s failure to confess provokes a curse that his latter-day descendants spend the rest of the novel trying to escape. While the scene of his original sin is immediately engaging - his portrait as a sort of bumbling everyman intriguingly out of step with his renown - the energy of what follows dips and soars, as gruelling vignettes of gender injustice jostle with hallucinatory dream sequences and occasional bouts of explainer-type description (“In the 60s and 70s, the Soviet Union was a major sponsor of postgraduate study for Ugandans”).
• Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is published by Oneworld (£14.99). To order a copy for £11.24 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
