Shortly after his arrival in Uganda, Scottish doctor Nicholas Garrigan is called to the scene of a bizarre accident: Idi Amin, careening down a dirt road in his Maserati, has hit a cow. When Garrigan tends to Amin, the dictator, obsessed with all things Scottish, appoints him as his personal physician. So begins a fateful dalliance with the African leader whose Emperor Jones–style autocracy would transform into a reign of terror.

In The Last King of Scotland, Foden’s Amin is as ridiculous as he is abhorrent: a self-proclaimed cannibal who, at the end of his eight years in power, would be responsible for 300,000 deaths. As Garrigan awakens to his patient’s barbarism—and his own complicity in it—we enter a venturesome meditation on conscience, charisma, and the slow corruption of the human heart.