Dust
Set in arid northern Kenya amid the political turmoil of the latter half of the twentieth century, this powerful first novel will evoke references to William Boyd and even to Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad. From the dramatic prologue in which Odidi Oganda is killed in a hail of bullets, to his sister Ajany’s investigation of his life and death, author Owuor shifts back and forth—from the Mau-Mau movement (in which Odidi and Ajany’s father, Nyipir, may have been complicit), to Kenya’s postindependence hopes and horrors, to the near-present, taking in along the way bloodshed, betrayal, and the critically tragic assassination of Tom Mboya in 1969, after which, we are told, Kenya’s official languages became English, Kiswahili, and Silence. The Oganda family’s relationship to the English colonialist Boltons, including sire Hugh, whose life had crossed Nyipir’s, is at the center of this compelling saga. When Hugh’s son Isaiah comes to Kenya to trace his father’s fate, the intersection of his activities with Ajany’s becomes the driving center of this important addition to the literature of contemporary Africa. --Mark Levine