So begins Nick Garrigan’s journey into a Con-radian heart of darkness, as his own moral center battles weakly against, and then succumbs to, the dark and irresistible seductions of Idi Amin Dada, whose cruelty and cunning are masked by brilliant rhetoric, hilarious wit, and electrifying personal magnetism. When at last Nick awakens to the horrors of Amin’s regime, he must awaken also to his own complicity in it–he cared for Amin, as a doctor and as a friend–and to the knowledge that he is both a traitor to his own country and a prisoner in his new one. By turns comic and chilling, Giles Foden’s The Last King of Scotland is a masterful debut from a remarkable talent–a riveting history of “blood, misery and foolishness” that lingers in the mind long after the last page is turned, and a profound meditation on conscience, charisma, and the slow corruption of the human heart.