Praised on both sides of the Atlantic as well as in the authors native Uganda, Moses Isegawas first novel Abyssinian Chronicles was a big, transcendently ambitious book (Boston Globe) that blasts open the tidy borders of the conventional novel and redraws the literary map to reveal a whole new world (Elle).In Snakepit, Isegawa returns to the surreal, brutalizing landscapes of his homeland during the time of dictator Idi Amin, when interlocking webs of emotional cruelty kept tyrants gratified and servants cooperative, a land where no onenot husbands or wives, parents or loversis ever safe from the implacable desires of men in power. Men like General Bazooka, who rues the day he hired Cambridge-educated Bat Katanga as his Bureaucrat Twoa man too good at his joband places in his midst (and his bed) a seductive operative named Victoria, whose mission and motives are anything but simple. Ambitious and acquisitive, more than a little arrogant, Katanga finds himself steadily boxed in by events spiraling madly out of control, where deception, extortion, and murder are just so many cards to be played.From the Trade Paperback edition.