We Are All Birds of Uganda cover art

We Are All Birds of Uganda

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

We Are All Birds of Uganda

By: Hafsa Zayyan
Narrated by: Taheen Modak, Sagar Arya
Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

You can’t stop birds from flying, can you, Sameer? They go where they will....

1960s Uganda. Hasan is struggling to run his family business following the sudden death of his wife. Just as he begins to see a way forward, a new regime seizes power and a wave of rising prejudice threatens to sweep away everything he has built.

Present-day London. Sameer, a young, high-flying lawyer, senses an emptiness in what he thought was the life of his dreams. Called back to his family home by an unexpected tragedy, Sameer begins to find the missing pieces of himself not in his future plans, but in a past he never knew.

Moving between two continents and several generations over a troubled century, We Are All Birds of Uganda is a multi-layered, moving and immensely resonant novel of love, loss and what it means to find home.

It is the first work of fiction by Hafsa Zayyan, co-winner of the inaugural #Merky Books New Writers’ Prize and one of the most exciting young novelists of today.

©2021 Hafsa Zayyan (P)2021 Penguin Audio Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction South Asian Creators Africa Tear-jerking Inspiring Thought-Provoking

Listeners also enjoyed...

 The Halfways cover art
The Locked-Away Life cover art
Lagos to London cover art
The Returnees cover art
Leave Well Alone cover art
The Mountains Sing cover art
The Truth About My Mother cover art
The Long Way Home cover art
Who's Loving You cover art
The Reunion cover art
The Italian Daughter cover art
Under the Italian Sun cover art
David and Ameena cover art
One Summer cover art
All stars
Most relevant  
I was soo ready to give this 5 stars until the ending. confusing 😕

Almost 5 stars 🌟

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I loved this story and thoroughly enjoyed the audio book. Only issues were with volume differences between the recordings of the two narrators - a bit annoying.

Fantastic story great performances

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Loved it. It’s rare to be grabbed from the beginning but I really was. I will be thinking about it for a while, I know.

Great book

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I was pleasantly surprised by this one. I really enjoyed the prose, character development and the storyline. Really good work from both narrators. Looking forward to reading more from this author.

Enjoyable

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I did not have an issue with the different volume of two narrators. The narrator who read the part of the grandfather was excellent. The story is an insight into social history that we would not get from history books. An enjoyable novel.

An insightful novel.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This book is brilliant and handles issues of racial tension with subtlety. The only issue is that the two narrators recordings are at very different volumes, meaning that as it switches between chapters you can't hear Hassan even on full volume and then get your ear blasted off by Samir. It's a shame, as both narrators do a great job, it's just whoever mixed/produced it that has messed up.

Book brilliant, narration brilliant, issue with so

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The story is such a difficult and brilliant one on what does it mean to say you are African in a post-colonial context. And the politics of the continues impact of British colonialism on our countries while you continue to just want to live, fall in love, be happy. There were moments I had to question my own bias as a Black African and good story-telling should make you question & self-reflect.

The book was so badly edited unfortunately. No fault on the readers who read very well but the volume was all over the place and several glitchy moments. Not great on the sound editors and a pity. I pushed through only cause of the story.

Brilliant Story (not well-edited)

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I am one of the Ugandan Asians that came here to the UK in 1972 when i was only a child. Books like this intrigue me as I am hoping to understand the true history of what happened and what my parents went through to come here. There are many similarities to the family in this story, but I felt that there was too much jumping around and not a robust telling of the story.

There were opportunities to expand and areas that were unnecessary to the story - little things that didn’t give any gravitas to anything.

Don’t get me wrong - I enjoyed the story to a point but was just disappointed with elements introduced and not followed through fully. However the final couple of chapters I found very lazily written. A real shame.

What really annoyed me though on my audible was the quality of the recording (which I have flagged to audible). The narrators seem to have recorded at two different levels that either deafened me or i had to turn the volume up to high just to hear (not to mention the occasional coughing by the elder narrator).

The younger narrator wasn’t great at the pronouncing of the Gujarati words which I find annoying as I feel that they could have found a narrator who could maybe speak Gujarati! But again it wasn’t a major distraction. Not like the sound levels...gggrrrrrrrr!!!!

I would recommend the book but the mediocre scoring are my niggles. As I say, it was good but could have been great.

Good Not Great

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A brilliant relatable story telling experience and impact of colonialism across generations for the generations

a brilliant colonialism story for the generations

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
It’s hard to think this is a debut novel. Such a compelling story, so many issues tackled in this wonderful book: immigration, long side effects of colonialism, a sweet love story, inter generational contrasts and a family saga. I divored this book, I really hope this talented young writer will deligh us again and again in the future .

Simply wonderful!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews