Giles Foden’s first book was this Whitbread winning novel from 1998. We follow a young doctor who accepts work in Uganda around the time that Idi Amin was coming to power, and who eventually becomes both Amin’s personal doctor as well as a confident of sorts.
As such, Idi Amin is a fictionalised character in this novel, coming across as a very real person. That he was quite possibly psychotic is never far away from the surface.
That completes the published Foden oeuvre to date. The next Foden novel is Mimi and Toutou’s Big Adventure due in September, so I shall look forward to that with pleasure.