'It seethes with energy and teems with memorable characters.'
Kintu
From the winner of the Jhalak Prize, 2021
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
‘Ugandan literature can boast of an international superstar in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’ Economist
An award-winning debut that vividly reimagines Uganda’s troubled history through the cursed bloodline of the Kintu clan
In this epic tale of fate, fortune and legacy, Jennifer Makumbi vibrantly brings to life this corner of Africa and this colourful family as she reimagines the history of Uganda through the cursed bloodline of the Kintu clan.
The year is 1750. Kintu Kidda sets out for the capital to pledge allegiance to the new leader of the Buganda kingdom. Along the way he unleashes a curse that will plague his family for generations. Blending oral tradition, myth, folktale and history, Makumbi weaves together the stories of Kintu’s descendants as they seek to break free from the burden of their past to produce a majestic tale of clan and country – a modern classic.
Reviews
Sunday Times, Best Books of the Year
‘Kintu is an important book. It is also a very good one...inventive in scope, masterful in execution, [Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi] does for Ugandan literature what Chinua Achebe did for Nigerian writing.’
Guardian
‘Ugandan literature can boast of an international superstar in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, whose debut novel Kintu is a multi-generational saga that ties oral myth to a recognisable present.’
Economist
‘A highly ambitious, dense and tightly written narrative… Makumbi succeeds in making us feel the emotional importance of uncovering family history. Often faced with agonisingly difficult legacies and situations, her characters don’t just want but need explanations.’
Times Literary Supplement
‘Immediately engaging…as gruelling vignettes of gender injustice jostle with hallucinatory dream sequences.’
Observer
‘Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi's Kintu has been called a Ugandan One Hundred Years of Solitude.’
Salman Rushdie, New York Times
‘Kintu is a triumph of east African literature and one that delights in the pliant nature of storytelling itself, the ways in which family lore is passed down and the impact of variations on it... This rich drama examines the power of such legacies, and the potential for even the most far-flung, estranged families to unite in the face of ages-old evil.’
Financial Times
‘Epic both in intention and execution, Kintu contains a vast number of characters, avenging ghosts and portentous visions...the final coming together of the entire Kintu clan, arrived at with precision and intricacy, makes for a satisfying and thoughtful denouement.’
Spectator
'A Ugandan masterpiece that traces a family curse across the generations.'
TLS, 'Looking back: 2010-2019'
‘A soaring and sublime epic. One of those great stories that was just waiting to be told.’
Marlon James, Man Booker Prize-winning author of A Brief History of Seven Killings
‘Kintu is an entertaining, engrossing, and, crucially, intimate read... an extraordinary novel that is unafraid and beautifully unashamed to examine Uganda’s rich culture. It is a novel that is proudly Ugandan; it is a novel that deserves to be widely read.’
Irish Times
‘A family saga that reaches back into that country’s history with an assurance and readability that makes its historical depth feel light as water.’
LA Review of Books
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is a Ugandan novelist and short story writer. She has a PhD from Lancaster University. Her first novel, Kintu (Oneworld, 2018), won the Kwani? Manuscript Project in 2013 and was longlisted for the Etisalat Prize in 2014. She was awarded the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for ‘Let’s Tell This Story Properly’, which featured in her first collection, Manchester Happened (Oneworld, 2019). She was awarded the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction 2018 and lives in Manchester, where she lectures in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. In 2020, she was selected as one of 100 Most Influential Africans of 2020 by New African magazine.
Author page
