The Stillness Before Dawn - Erik Gorter

Autor: Erik Gorter

Editorial: Huge Jam

Año: 25/09/2026

ISBN: 9781916604469

Encuadernación: Tapa blanda

Páginas: 436 pp.

Idioma: eng

EAN: 9781916604469

The Stillness Before Dawn is a debut historical novel by Erik Gorter, published by Huge Jam in October 2026. It moves between 1965 and 2024. The title and epigraph come from Nick Makoha?s poem The Good Light, which evokes the hour of darkness just before things change.
Content. In 1965, twenty-year-old Pradeep Paddy Gupta meets Charlie Tanirika on a train from Calcutta to Cochin. Charlie is heading to Leeds to study, and the two become close friends. When Paddy?s uncle Arjun is murdered in Uganda, Paddy travels to Jinja to settle the estate and ends up running the family?s cotton and garment business with his cousin Divya. Their letters to each other form the book?s emotional spine. As Idi Amin seizes power in the 1971 coup and expels Uganda?s Asian community in 1972, the letters stop. Paddy?s story then follows imprisonment in Makindye and Mbarara, a desperate escape across Lake Victoria with a stray dog called Earl, and a hard-won new life in Puglia, Italy.
In a parallel strand set in 2024, Yorkshire Post journalist Max Peterson, recovering from a head injury, is drawn into Charlie?s story by a box of old letters. He and Charlie travel to Uganda to find out what became of Paddy and the Gupta estate. They uncover a web of land seizures, corruption and political cover-ups that still protects powerful people. Soon they are being watched and hunted across Kampala, Nairobi and the Aberdare forest.
Themes. The novel explores friendship across decades and continents, and the unsent words and unasked questions that shape a life. It examines displacement and statelessness, the long afterlife of the 1972 expulsion, and the quieter rot of corruption that outlived Amin. It also looks at survival, grief, and the way memory, whether lost to a concussion or buried in a loft, can be recovered and used to bear witness.
Context. The book draws on real events, namely Amin?s expulsion of roughly 80,000 Asians from Uganda, the seizure and reallocation of their property, and the troubled Departed Asians Property Custodian Board. The author is a retired humanitarian aid worker, originally from the Netherlands and now living in Bedfordshire, and he draws on his field experience. The dedication reads To Yaso, who made it possible.
Style. The chapters alternate between Paddy?s first-person account and a third-person present-day thriller. Newspaper articles and letters are woven through, mixing historical drama, mystery and a moving story of love and loss.
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