"Jennifer Makumbi continues to astound me. Her stories are emotionally complex and utterly sure-footed. You know how sometimes you overhear someone recounting a story on the phone and you don't get half the references and you don't know the people they're talking about, but the storyteller is so assured and compelling, you can't stop listening? That's what it's like to read Let's Tell This Story Properly as a westerner."
Publisher Transit Books
Publication Date 2019-04-30
Section New Titles - Paperback / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Rachel S.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9781945492228
Stories of race, class, and the Ugandan immigrant experience in Britain by the author of Kintu and winner of the Windham-Campbell Prize.
"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.
