“Goretti Kyomuhendo has crafted an intelligent, sensitive, beautiful metaphor of hope…” Emilia Ilieva, Egerton University, Kenya

Set during the last year of the Ugandan tyrant Idi Amin’s despotic, often surreal rule, Waiting evokes the fear and courage of a close-knit society uncertain of what the edicts of a madman or the marauding of his disintegrating army will bring with each day.

Forgotten in their “backwater”, far from Amin’s serial wars and repressions between 1971-1979, teenager Alinda and her family experience terror firsthand when the troops of the self-proclaimed “Last King of Scotland” use the local highway to escape pursuing Ugandan ans Tanzanian allied forces. With her mother on the verge of delivering a child, her brother anxious to join “the Liberators”, and a house full of starving siblings, neighbors, and displaced refugees, Alinda learns how to survive and then begins thinking about a new life.

Waiting captures the realities of a besieged home front, particularly the effects of this internecine war on women. At the same time, the novel reflects the resilience of the Ugandan people as they start the process of reconstructing their lives, relationships and homes.