Enjoyed this sprawling family saga, A History of Burning by Janika Oza. A boy from Gujarat is tricked into become an indentured servant building the Mombasa-Kampala railroad around 1900. After the end of his work, he remains and hardscrabbles a new life. His granddaughter Latika becomes a central figure for most of the book, as the descendants move to Canada after the Amin expulsion of 1972. If you liked the bittersweet coda of Mira Nair’s film Mississippi Masala you’ll definitely want to read this book.
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Recent Posts
- Reading Nov-Dec 2025 and Jan 2026
- AI as an existential threat – Kevane preliminary draft
- “What can it do?” A living list of computational problems that deep learning/AI/neural nets can or seems likely to “do” (at varying cost and efficacy)
- Reading August-September 2025
- The typical popular sci-fi version of AI posing an existential risk?
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Friends of African Village Libraries (I post regularly here)- Sumbrungu Community Library nighttime reading
- Résumé du livre Une grande mère criminelle
- Organisation d’une séance de discussion autour d’un livre à la bibliothèque de Dimikuy
- Librarians of Tuy monthly meeting January 2026, Burkina Faso
- Impressions sur la production de livres CMH au Burkina Faso
- Compte rendu de la première rencontre des gérants de la zone du Tuy
- Science fiction books for libraries in Burkina Faso and Ghana
- Animation d’une séance de lecture à la bibliothèque de Dimikuy
- Nyariga Community Library in Ghana, photos January 2026
- Visite à la bibliothèque de Béréba, Burkina Faso