"A sobering reality check and an impressive work of fiction." --Washington Times

"An affecting, chilling historical novel." --New York

"Lurid and delightful, written with wit and real maturity." --Kirkus Reviews

"Genuinely beautiful and disturbing." --Village Voice

"Garrigan is the perfect foil for Amin, whose overwhelming physical presence, peacockish rhetoric and cold-blooded savagery are so well captured as to make this novel more than a mesmerizing read: it is also a forceful account of a surrealistic and especially ugly chapter of modern history."
--Publishers Weekly

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 Maserati, has hit a cow. When Garrigan tends to Amin, the dictator, obsessed with all things Scottish, appoints him as his personal physician. So begins a fateful dalliance with the 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 self-proclaimed cannibal who, at the end of his eight years in power, would be responsible for 300,000 deaths. As Garrigan awakens to his patient's barbarism--and his own complicity in it--we enter a venturesome meditation on conscience, charisma, and the slow corruption of the human heart.