Early Cover Reveal: US Edition of Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi's 'Kintu'

Back in May, Writivism announced on its social media pages that Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi's Kintu had found a Western publisher - the Oakland-based indie publisher, Transit Books - and would be published in the US in 2017. This was amazing and wonderful news because Kintu is one of those books that I had been told was fantastic, brilliant, a must-read - but ridiculously hard to get a hold of outside of East Africa. Winner of the 2013 Kwani? manuscript project, Kintu follows the stories of Kintu Kidda - Ppokino of Buddu Province, in the kingdom of Buganda - and his descendants over 2 centuries (and a bit) as they seek to break with the burden of their shared past. I finally got a copy while I was in Kampala for Writivism, and you know what, they weren't lying - the book is fantastic, brilliant, a must-read. I am 240 pages in to Kintu - about to start Part IV - and I have been savouring every word as I really do not want it to end.

So this makes it even more exciting that today Transit books (can we take a minute to celebrate small presses/indie publishers and African literature) gave an 'early peak at the cover art for Kintu' on their Facebook page. Transit Books also quotes Makumbi's reaction to the book cover in their facebook post:

This is 'Kintu's' first outing in the West. I am delighted that the landscape, the immensity of the myth (looming over the characters and place) have been captured in the images colours and illusions. Hats off, Transit Books.

Well, here's the cover!!!!! And let the countdown to the US edition and wider availability of this gem of a novel begin.

Cover art via Transit Books facebook page

from bookshy http://ift.tt/2cPjhVn

Comments

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 . In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...

TOBI'S DESK

Search This Blog