First published in 1902, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness was the model for Francis Ford Coppola's movie Apocalypse Now. In Heart of Darkness, an ivory company assigns Marlow the task of finding a stranded riverboat in the Belgian Congo and bringing back the company's top representative, whose behavior is becoming erratic. Marlow witnesses horrors and brutalities he could never have imagined.

Foden's second novel is Ladysmith (2000). It tells the story of the South African town of Ladysmith, its residents, and how they survive a four-month siege by Boer forces. The novel is based partly on the letters of Foden's great-grandfather, a British soldier in South Africa at the end of the nineteenth century.

Critics have compared The Last King of Scotland to the writings of British author Graham Greene. In 1961, Greene published A Burnt-Out Case, the tale of a spiritually dead...