Shortly after his arrival in Uganda, Scottish doctor Nicholas Garrigan is called to the scene of a bizarre accident: Idi Amin, careening down a dirt road in his red Maserati, has run over a cow. When Garrigan tends to Amin, the dictator, in his obsession for all things Scottish, appoints him as his personal physician. And so begins a fateful dalliance with the central African leader whose Emperor Jones-style autocracy would transform into a reign of terror.
In The Last King of Scotland Foden's Amin is as ridiculous as he is abhorrent: a grown man who must be burped like an infant, a self-proclaimed cannibalist who, at the end of his 8 years in power, would be responsible for 300,000 deaths. And as Garrigan awakens to his patient's baroque barbarism--and his own complicity in it--we enter a venturesome meditation on conscience, charisma, and the slow corruption of the human heart. Brilliantly written, comic and profound, The Last King of Scotland announces a major new talent.
WINNER
| 1998 Whitbread First Novel Award
"Genuinely beautiful and disturbing." --The Village Voice"This decidedly quirky yet absorbing first novel--that brings to mind the diabolical Evelyn Waugh." --Los Angeles Times Book Review
Giles Foden was born in 1967 in England and spent his youth in Africa. Between 1990 and 2006 he worked as an editor at The Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian. In 1998 he published The Last King of Scotland, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award and was later made into a feature film. The author of two other novels and also a work of narrative nonfiction, in 2007 he was appointed professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich. He lives in Norfolk, England.
Shortly after his arrival in Uganda, Scottish doctor Nicholas Garrigan is called to the scene of a bizarre accident: Idi Amin, careening down a dirt road in his red Maserati, has run over a cow. When Garrigan tends to Amin, the dictator, in his obsession for all things Scottish, appoints him as his personal physician. And so begins a fateful dalliance with the central African leader whose Emperor Jones-style autocracy would transform into a reign of terror.
In The Last King of Scotland Foden's Amin is as ridiculous as he is abhorrent: a grown man who must be burped like an infant, a self-proclaimed cannibalist who, at the end of his 8 years in power, would be responsible for 300,000 deaths. And as Garrigan awakens to his patient's baroque barbarism--and his own complicity in it--we enter a venturesome meditation on conscience, charisma, and the slow corruption of the human heart. Brilliantly written, comic and profound, The Last King of Scotland announces a major new talent.
Awards
WINNER
| 1998 Whitbread First Novel Award
Praise
"Genuinely beautiful and disturbing." --The Village Voice"This decidedly quirky yet absorbing first novel--that brings to mind the diabolical Evelyn Waugh." --Los Angeles Times Book Review
Giles Foden was born in 1967 in England and spent his youth in Africa. Between 1990 and 2006 he worked as an editor at The Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian. In 1998 he published The Last King of Scotland, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award and was later made into a feature film. The author of two other novels and also a work of narrative nonfiction, in 2007 he was appointed professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich. He lives in Norfolk, England.
