Promises

From the award winning author of Waiting… Promises are like tilapia from Lake Victoria – glittering, evasive… slippery.Adjuna and Kagaba have scraped, begged, and borrowed money from friends and family to afford one airplane ticket and papers to travel to London.  Educated in economics but unable to find work in his home country of Uganda, Kagaba plans to live in the United Kingdom at the behest of his uncle who has promised to find him a good job, and quickly.   As Kagaba rushes to meet his flight out of Kampala, Ajuna, feeling sick, is warned by her sister-in-law to get checked out for malaria.  With her husband now ensconced on the other side of the planet,  Ajuna collapses and is rushed to the hospital only to discover life altering circumstances. Worried that the tenuous ties that keep them married will unravel during a separation that spans continents, Ajuna turns to friends and family for support. As her loneliness grows, the lines between help and something more begin to blur.      In the United Kingdom, Kagaba fights to overcome his limited visa and clarify his immigration status.  Desperate to find work to care for Ajuna and to pay off debts, Kagaba confronts a maze of rules, bureaucracy, and frightening detention centers. This bewildering underbelly of immigration enforcement and the crooked systems developed to evade deportation have spawned a shadow world of exploitation and a class of people that live in constant fear on the legal margins.  In the pressure cooker of London’s immigrant community, Kagaba finds friends who can help – but to accept, he may unintentionally give up more of himself than Ajuna will tolerate.  Who we are and the relationships and promises we keep or break are profoundly tested by circumstance and small twists of fate. A heartfelt book that details the unintended consequences of fighting for a better life.