Abyssinian Chronicles - Hardcover

The prose itself bristles and cooks, with graceful transitions ("This time a year passed without hearing any news from Tiida") and scenes lurching with activity. Isegawa, who was born in Uganda but now lives in the Netherlands, is a master of unexpected verbs and details. Here Mugezi describes his mother's voice:

This woman knew how to irritate me on all fronts: her pathetic country-western girlie whine, xeroxed from a white nun from her convent days, the same nun from whom she had inherited the little tremolos which she sprinkled piously on the last hymn every night, really got to me.

"A ruthless book . . . extraordinary and important. Orchestrating many varied stories within the narrative, Isegawa forcefully propels the reader along."
-- Het Parool

"Epic, sprawling, brimming with life--and death, Moses Isegawa's Abyssinian Chronicles blasts open the tidy borders of the conventional novel and redraws the literary map to reveal a whole new world . . . Eloquent, harrowing, and compulsively readable . . . Heavily populated with distinct, memorable characters, teeming with subplots, love affairs and vendettas, the novel begins in the African equivalent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Macondo--equally exotic, equally under the spell of Catholicism and superstition, of romantic longings and sexual obsessions, of magical prophecy and gritty postcolonial reality . . . Isegawa's writing is so assured and seductive, his deployment of humor, incident, and detail so simultaneously freewheeling and controlled that we're deeply involved in the life of this family . . . By then, it's way to late to stop reading, and we can only hang on for the thrilling and nightmarish ride into, and out of, the whirlwind that swept through the far-away country that Moses Isegawa makes so vivid, so immediate--and so heartbreakingly real."
-- Francine Prose, Elle

"A great novel . . . a masterpiece!"
-- Haarlems Dagblad

"A picaresque novel enlarged to epic proportions . . . a flood of either colorful or vengeful stories of the stormy history of what the British used to call 'the pearl of Africa'."
-- De Morgen

"Isegawa's writing stems from the African tradition of colorful and exuberant storytelling. He captivates the reader with this truly magnificent book."
-- Algemeen Dagblad