All Our Names by Dinaw Mengetu

This is a complicated book that is set in Uganda in the 1970s at a time when there remained no optimism related to independence and before the realities of civil war destroyed the country.  There are many stories that could be set against this background, but this story is not so much about Uganda but rather the fate of a child of the revolution who ends up traumatized and silent in the United States.

There are two Isaacs in the book. One is a brave, impetuous revolutionary at Kampala University. He taunts rich students, plasters the halls with flyers, and eventually stokes a small revolt, which will spiral out of control both for him and others. He yearns for vengeance or justice, or something else that he can't quite define.

The other Isaac, is a cautious, bookish young man to whom the fiery Isaac will eventually give his name and identity as a kind of exit visa from dangerous times. The milder Isaac grew up outside Uganda on a farm, dreaming of university and rereading the dozen or so Victorian novels he had nearby hundreds of times. He cares less for justice than he does for survival. The story goes between a black man making his way in America  (with an illicit relationship with a white woman that he cannot bring himself to tell what he has done and what has happened to him) and the worsening civil unrest in Uganda.  Powerful, wonderful, awful, and mesmerizing.