The Day I Finally Met You

Jovia Mukiibi has spent thirty-two years being careful.

Careful about the university she chose. Careful about the job she took. Careful about the men she dated. So careful, for so long, that one Tuesday morning in March she looked in the mirror and found nobody looking back.

So she books a flight to Edinburgh.

She doesn't tell her mother until she's crossing Jinja Bridge on the way to the airport. She doesn't have a plan. She has a carry-on bag, three notebooks just in case, and the address of a flat with yellow curtains that she found online at eleven forty-three at night and rented before the thought finished forming.

What she finds in Edinburgh is not what she expected. She finds a heron named Angus. She finds a librarian named Margaret who can read a reader the way a doctor reads a patient. And she finds Callum Reid — the architect who lives in the flat above hers, who walks the same path every morning, who has been trying for five years to build a room worthy of his dead brother.

Two people in the middle of something. Recognising it in each other.

The Day I Finally Met You is a novel about leaving and arriving. About the notebooks we keep hidden and the lives we are afraid to claim. About what it means to pay attention — to a city, to a person, to yourself.

For readers of Sally Rooney, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Bernardine Evaristo.

Walugembe Ashiraf is a Ugandan author based in Matugga. This is his debut novel.