Take a look around my site, which includes more information on my book, info on how you can contact me and a blog dedicated to all things writing, publishing and reading. I read We Are All Birds of Uganda by Hafsa Zayyan two years ago and both books highlighted the racial and economic privileges Asians had over Black Ugandans referring to their subordinates as “boys”, “girls” or even worse.

In this way, Shah allows the actions and moral compass of Amin to become a dialogue between reader and text, as opposed to a one-sided diatribe. It is Asha with whom this resonates most profoundly, as a young Asian woman gradually realising the potency of her own agency removed from the assumptive constraints of what she thought she wanted from life. From a life full of sunshine and lustrous nature to the formal and manicured London life, be it living in army barracks to finding a rooftop home in the cold and dull weather of their new place of living. From the green hilltops of Kampala, to the terraced houses of London, Neema Shah’s extraordinarily moving debut Kololo Hill explores what it means to leave your home behind, what it takes to start again, and the lengths some will go to protect their loved ones.

The identity crisis that comes as a part of being a refugee, the heartache that arises from the loss of loved ones, the struggle to safeguard present relationships while trying to figure out “why me? Kenya had also made life very difficult for Asian business owners a few years earlier, but Amin took it further. Uganda comes alive in the capable hands of the author, the smells, the feel and the food, and in England their experience is, of course, discombobulatingly different.

My heart goes out to faithful December, strong-willed Asha, resilient Jaya, good-hearted Vijay and happy-go-lucky Motichand.

There were also the cultural differences, the hardship, and the hostility that they faced on a daily basis. I also failed to really connect to Pran in the end but I will not forget to mention that Pran was probably one of the most complex characters in the book and I’d honestly have loved to have his POV but I guess the complexity is a reason why Neema didn’t give him a POV. This is an astonishingly assured debut, written with passion and emotion for its subject matter without resorting to sentimentality or political agenda. There was the initial shock of the holding camps, and when our particular family eventually found somewhere to live, it was so vastly different from their beautiful hilltop home in Kampala. Kololo Hill follows the journey of an Indian family that was also once brought to Uganda and had worked hard to establish a family business.

It is important that she also notes that many Ugandan’s were under thriving compared to the Ugandan Asians, which reminded me of when I first read the title Kololo Hill and learnt the story was set in Uganda.Life in Kampala is on a knife edge and it’s painfully hard to read how people were so persecuted and worse. Its well written, and the passages surrounding forced evacuation and the sudden reality of being a displaced immigrant are memorable. It is a moving story of displacement, immigration, identity and belonging and one I’d certainly recommend. Kololo Hill is a wonderful novel, at once intimate in it’s focus on one family, but at the same time it captures the universal experiences of so many who have had to flee their homelands, finding themselves at the mercy of other nations willing, or not, to offer them refuge.