Narrative Landscape Press has acquired the English-language publishing rights for East and West Africa to Promises, the fifth novel by Ugandan author Goretti Kyomuhendo. Under the acquisition, Narrative Landscape Press, a Nigeria based press, will publish a new regional edition of the novel, with a refreshed cover design, making it available across bookstores, libraries, and schools in East and West Africa. Publication is scheduled for early 2026.

Promises follows two young lovers, Ajuna and Kagaba, whose plans to marry are derailed when Kagaba cannot find employment in Uganda and leaves for the UK, while Ajuna stays behind as a lecturer at the National University. The novel alternates between their perspectives across two continents, building a portrait of migration, waiting, and the ripple effects of one person’s choices on everyone around them. It is Kyomuhendo’s first novel to feature a male protagonist and her first sustained engagement with Ugandan immigrant life outside Africa. In Brittle Paper’s review of the novel, Ruth S. Wenske described it as “a rare achievement” that “thematizes urgent social and political problems” while never reading as didactic — “an utter readerly tale, that draws out pleasure and livingness in between difficulties and disasters.”

The novel took Kyomuhendo nearly ten years to write, rooted in years of listening to the stories of Ugandan immigrants in the UK. In our interview with the author, she told Wenske: “I spent the first two years just talking to people and visiting immigration centers… I felt that Ugandans who had moved to the UK covered up the difficulties they faced. They would not talk about the hardships.” That anger at the silence around immigrant struggle is the engine of the book. At its heart, though, Promises is a meditation on what a better life actually means. As Kyomuhendo put it: “Whether we go for further studies, or go for another job, or leave one place for another, or fall in love, the motivation is the same. We are looking for something better for ourselves, and for the people around us. But the definition of that better life is what is debatable, what is relative; that is the in-between.”

Kyomuhendo is one of Uganda’s foundational literary figures. Her four previous novels — The First Daughter (1996), Secrets No More (1999, winner of the Uganda National Literary Award for Best Novel), Whispers from Vera (2002), and Waiting: A Novel of Uganda at War (2007, translated into Spanish in 2022) — have established her as a central voice in East African literature. She was the first coordinator of FEMRITE, the Uganda Women Writers’ Association, and later founded the African Writers Trust in 2009 to connect writers on the continent with those in the diaspora. “We are honoured to bring Promises into our catalogue,” said Anwuli Ojogwu, Managing Director at Narrative Landscape Press. “Goretti Kyomuhendo’s writing carries emotional depth, social insight, and literary elegance.”

This is a meaningful acquisition for a press that has made building an accessible African literary canon its explicit mission. Brittle Paper published both a review of Promises and an extended interview with Kyomuhendo when the novel first appeared. Both are worth reading alongside this announcement. The interview in particular traces the full arc: from a girl in Hoima who had never met a writer, to the woman who told Wenske that reading Things Fall Apart at thirteen “gave me the license to dream.” Promises is the latest chapter of what that license has made possible.