We Are All Birds of Uganda

Really loved this book. Really bought in to the characters and their hopes and dreams. I feel the ending was realistic but sad. Stayed with me for a while.

A decent story but perhaps the author tried to squeeze too much in a relatively compact book. The first part of the story is a bit tedious. I felt the bit about Sameer in the corporate London world, was a bit too long. The letters from his grandfather, much more interesting but given very few pages.When Sameer gets to Uganda, the story picks up pace. I found it took me very long to read the first part compared to the second, which flowed and covered lots more ground. The complexity of Indians in Uganda is not easy to compress in a 300 page novel. Hafsa Zayyan takes a decent shot at it.

Hafsa Zayyan is an incredibly gifted writer and you can see she has done a lot of research and put so much effort into writing this book for which she won the @merkybooks New Writers Prize. For a debut author, her writing style is very immersive and accomplished.This is the second book I have read which highlights the expulsion of Asians from Uganda and although fictional, it is an important read in order to understand a part of history which is not very well known.In this multigenerational book we read the story of Sameer, a Leicester born, high-flying lawyer in present day London, as he embarks on a journey of self discovery and enlightenment when he is offered an exciting job opportunity which would move him away from his family to live in Singapore. Alongside this we also see the story of his grandfather, Hasan, who is remarrying after the sudden death of his first wife. This is conveyed through letters written to his dead wife and starts from the 1960s. These letters play a central role in enabling the reader to understand the history behind Sameer and his family and the events which led up to the expulsion of Asians from Uganda and to the people they have become.Zayyan has packed so much into this novel and cleverly introduces us to a whole host of situations where we see the impact of colonialism, culture, displacement, multi-faceted racism, micro-aggressions and discrimination in the workplace as well as a story of friendship, love, loss, hope, self-discovery and family drama.Islam was an underlying theme in my opinion, and I felt it was woven in quite naturally and in the most part was portrayed positively. It was interesting to see the religious conflict and identity crisis faced by Sameer and the reasons for some of his actions as well as how his faith developed over the story. He had certain characteristics which annoyed me so much but I liked how his character matured by the end.If you liked The Family Tree and Kolo Hill, you may enjoy this story too as I was reminded of both as I read this book, although all three novels are different and have their own unique qualities.

I was really disappointed by this novel, more so because I was really looking forward to reading it. The first part was really slow, and I kept wondering when the plot would kick off. The narrative gap between the first and second parts really jarred with me as we suddenly find Sameer in Uganda based on a casual invitation towards the end of the first part. It would have enriched his character development to see how this decision was made, how the family reacted, and how Sameer stood his ground.Sameer himself comes across as a pampered rich boy (middle class Indian whose family are from Uganda) and rather passive. For example, the entire first part (154 pages) is taken up with him prevaricating about telling his parents he's got a job in Singapore (and doesn't want to quit his law job and work for his dad). Nothing else happens in the main plot. At one point, I was so bored of Sameer that I wanted either Jeremiah or Rahool to be the main character! Secondly, Sameer experiences some very obvious forms of racism in the workplace which he does absolutely nothing about. On the one hand, I found it incredible that nobody who experiences or witnesses the racism says anything - not even the woman from HR. On the other hand, and much more frustratingly, I felt we'd been led down a particular plot line but with no pay off. We get to know that Sameer, Jeremiah and Rahool are best friends, but I didn't really get the nuances of their friendship. Even when Rahool ends up in hospital (which is reported but never actually explored), I didn't get a sense of their friendship beyond the exposition and backstory. In fact, a lot of the present tense characters came across as much younger than they are, and I had to keep reminding myself that they're in their mid-20s. I also felt that the romance element (Sameer falling in love) was completely unnecessary.The other strand of the novel is set in the past and told in a series of letters written by Sameer's grandfather to his dead wife. They cover the period between 1945 and 1981 (end of WW2, Partition of India, the rise and fall of Idi Amin, the eviction of the Indians, their resettlement in the UK). I found this part of the novel to be much more interesting, and wished it was the main plot. (But, of course, in terms of craft, you can't have a main plot set in the past, and the subplot set in the present.) You can tell that Zayyan has spent hours and hours doing the research on Uganda's history, and it was lovely to read these beautiful letters about the fall of a dynasty and a man's yearning for his dead wife. This storyline had much more coherence, I felt, but I wanted it to reverberate more into the present.I'm only now reading the reviews of the novel, and it feels like we were reading different books. What I would really like to read are reviews written by Ugandans!

This very readable book tells two inter-related stories: at its centre is Sameer, at the book’s beginning a high-earning second-generation British-based Ugandan Asian about to take up a posting to Singapore; his story is set against letters from his Uganda resident grandfather to his dead first wife, written through the Obote and Amin regimes there. Sameer’s father reflects the strongly male-driven, patriarchal Asian community in Britain; his grandfather viewed Ugandans as friends but not as equals. Hafsa Zayyan’s research is impressive. I am loathe to write too much about the book’s contents as it would be too easy to provide spoilers. The pace of the narrative, the elegance of the writing and the depiction of the range of characters portrayed are striking. At the end of the book is a series of reading group questions - something I have not seen before.