Like many great novels, Goretti Kyomuhendo’s new novel Promises starts with a startling statement that anticipates its main drama: “It should have been their wedding day.” From there, the novel splits from “what should have been” into a new reality fueled by a dream.

Following the love story of Ajuna and Kagaba, two university graduates from Uganda, the novel begins where their joint life ends. We meet the protagonists as Kagaba is preparing to leave for the UK in search of employment, after failing to find a job in Uganda with his MA degree in Economics. Meanwhile his fiancé Ajuna, a geography lecturer, stays behind so as not to give up her job at the National University in Kampala. But their physical separation is neither the end of their relationship, nor the end of their respective searches for self-actualization.

According to Kyomuhendo herself, Promises is a novel about the human desire for a better life, and what happens in-between as we strive towards our fantasies. Like her previous novel Waiting (2007), it is a story of what happens while we wait, and the dual significance of waithood as both failure and potential. As the protagonist, Ajuna, tells her sister, “things don’t always work out the way you would have wished. You have to allow for the gray areas.” And it is in these gray areas that the novel shines: it follows an expansive cast of deeply sympathetic characters, whose everyday is irrevocably changed by the promise of a better life elsewhere. But alongside their hardships and frustrated expectations, it centers the actual livingness of the everyday, allowing the characters to be full of contradictions, yet make perfect sense.

Though at a first glance Promises might appear like a novel about romantic love and the hardships of migration, it is equally a novel about kinship and friendship, professional fulfillment, and the fine line between lies and fictions. Oscillating between Uganda and the UK, the novel straddles divergent social contexts, often in the form of explicit juxtapositions that are as witty as they are serious: “Me, I don’t eat muzungu food. These guys live on sandwiches—that’s a snack, not food. That’s why they have weak bones, and that’s why they will always need us to do the hard jobs.” At the same time, the novel also moves back and forth in time, drawing a detailed picture of Ajuna and Kagaba’s lives through the many people who make up their community, and the dense human networks between village and city, past and present, here and elsewhere.

Through these dualities of place and time, Promises deals with urgent societal issues, including migration, corruption, racism, moral conduct, and the heavy predicament of living without papers. Still, Promises never succumbs to the weight of its serious themes, since it maintains a readerly and often humorous tone that gives the impression of a story telling itself. This is Kyomuhendo’s masterful storytelling, which is all about the characters—their desires, flaws, inconsistencies, daily struggles, and pleasures—so much so that the narrator becomes almost invisible, and we get to suspend our disbelief and immerse ourselves fully in their points of view.

As a result, Promises does not read like a didactic enterprise, but rather as a deliciously intimate story about the complexities of being human: the family secrets, the contradictory social obligations, the emotional significance of food, the deep longing for love and home and safety, and the struggle to feel morally upright—or simply good enough—in one own’s eyes, even when the lines between right and wrong are blurred by impossible circumstances. In other words, while social and political questions serve as an important background, the characters are always central. Their life-making is always central.

One of the recurring themes in the novel is that of fictional lives, as characters both in Uganda and in the UK attempt to shield their loved ones from harsh realities by creating alternative versions of events—that is, by lying. But what do we make of this lying, when its purpose is love? And where do we draw the line between lies and promises—are the expectations we have around migration and romantic love not simply collectively held fictions? These are some of the many interesting questions that the novel raises. In the end, the characters’ ability to live through betrayals and conflicts gives them a deep humanness, and it is impossible not to like them.

Ultimately, it is a novel about how desire is woven into the fabric of the everyday, even under the most difficult circumstances. From the first scene in the novel, on what should have been Ajuna and Kagaba’s wedding night, desire drives the protagonists to seek out professional, physical, emotional, communal, and social fulfillment. This desire is not just personal (though certainly also that), but a deep desire for belonging, and for finding a better life, through and for others. But if “promises” are built on the often-unrealistic expectations we develop by observing other’s success from afar, the novel seems to suggest that desire—in its immediacy and intimacy—is the antidote.

I have written elsewhere that Kyomuhendo’s work bears a striking resemblance to Achebe’s, for instance in their preoccupation with community, with rural life (even when their novels migrate to the city), their strong historical consciousness, their thematization of waiting, and their choice of realism to carry the African experience. Much of this similarity lies in the narrative voice. For instance, in a seemingly insignificant moment in the novel, the elderly aunt Ssenga Jovia visits the city and is asked to take charge of the misbehaving youths: “you should take these girls back with you to the village and teach them some manners. Daphne has the manners of a goat.” The effortless manner in which the narrator captures social relationships, everyday speech, and the tension between the serious and the pedestrian, the tragic and the wonderous, bears the hallmark of Achebe’s relatability.

Through this narrative voice, Promises achieves something rare. There are few novels that maintain Things Fall Apart’s capacity to speak equally well, albeit in distinct registers, to local and international audiences. Even when Ajuna enters her geography-teacher mode and gives two ignorant white tourist a scathing lecture on Lake Nalubaale (which the latter refer to as Lake Victoria), the effect is neither teacherly nor anthropological, but rather one of establishing relationality, understanding. The novel is not ashamed of its pedagogical thrust, yet it is also never didactic; it invites readers to make their own meaning around complex issues.

Therefore, while the novel is grounded in Ugandan social codes and daily life, one can join the protagonists’ pleasures and frustrations even without prior knowledge of Ugandan culture. As a result, any attempt to read the novel as a political endeavor will fail to get at its beating heart. And it is this beating heart that straddles the distance between Uganda and the rest of the world, not just Kagaba’s physical trip.