Kololo Hill

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Throughout this ordeal, the reader is kept in the dark about a secret that threatens to upheave the tenuous new life they've created.

After studying law at university, Neema built a career in marketing, specialising in TV, digital and brand strategy for companies including the BBC.I don't have a creative writing BA or MA and I didn't start writing my first novel until I was in my late thirties. 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.

Already living in fear, the family are stunned when Amin makes his declaration, leave the country in 90 days, take only what you can carry, leave your homes, businesses and money behind and don’t come back. This novel is a must-read for anyone interested in historical fiction and stories of human strength and determination. 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.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. All in all, this is a fabulous, beautifully written and fascinating read from a talented author to watch out for.

A poignant story of a family who lost everything they loved, trying to rebuild their lives in a country so different from their own, and one where the welcome they received, was as cold as the weather. An impressive, confident debut about family and survival , against the backdrop of a history that is not written about often enough. This family drama set amidst the Asian expulsion in 1970s Uganda is a beautifully written character-driven story about the experience of being a refugee.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. Neema Shah positions Amin's decree halfway through her novel so we follow a family's life in the before and after of this enforced expulsion.

Kenya had also made life very difficult for Asian business owners a few years earlier, but Amin took it further.Poignantly showcasing the struggles, heartbreak and jarring motion of the devastatingly upheaving lives. Before reading this book, I did not know anything about Idi Amin, about Asians working in Uganda and Kenya for the rail works and about the expulsion that took place. neemashahauthor beautifully captures the lives of immigrants, their emotions while leaving everything behind and adapting to a new culture and country.