An audacious and beautiful novel that is both a unique family saga and a spellbinding story of the country of Kenya
YVONNE ADHIAMBO OWUOR was born in Kenya. Winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, she has also received an Iowa Writer's Fellowship. Her work has appeared in McSweeney's and other publications, and she has been a TEDx Nairobi speaker and a Lannan Foundation resident. She lives in Brisbane, Australia.
In this dazzling novel you will find the entirety of human
experience - tearshed, bloodshed, lust, love - in staggering
proportions
*Ghana Must Go*
Epic in scope, this is a big, big unforgettable book, full of love
and full of pain. Dust is a most visceral, moving novel about a
family caught up in the smelt of a Kenya roiling inside the lusts
and violences of its adolescence, determined to move past it. You
will meet a mother with an AK-47 you will never forget, a father
shamed by a secret, betrayed by a nation. The varied landscapes of
Kenya have never been more tenderly made alive. This is the novel
my twenty-first century has been waiting for, for our world in
these seismic times
*One Day I Will Write About This Place*
This stunning debut novel grabs the reader's heart, refusing to let
go... Owuor represents another shining talent among Africa's
writers publishing in English
*Library Journal (starred review)*
A rich exploration of Kenya's modern history... What's striking
here, though, isn't so much the state-of-the-nation aspects, but
its extraordinary prose. Owuor gives vivid descriptions of
character and landscape, dispensing with verbs to achieve poetic
compression, revelling in alliteration and half-rhyme. It's a
virtuoso literary performance
*Independent on Sunday*
Owuor's is a new voice from the African continent - distinct, rich,
unflappable in her convictions
*Counterpunch*
Epic, poetry-soaked... the most important novel to come out of
Africa since Half of a Yellow Sun
*‘Books of the Year’ Observer*
Refreshing... Simultaneously earthy and other-worldly. Owuor is a
welcome new voice
*Metro*
A complex story full of rich characters and magical prose
*Cruise International*
[A] richly evocative debut novel... Owuor's language is pungent,
poetic, almost synaesthetic. A subtle, sensitive portrait of
[Kenya]
*Daily Telegraph*
Absorbing [and] executed to great effect... Dust is a fine,
compassionate novel that relishes the complexity of human
relations. It is written in a language that is often beautifully
observant, and is alert in its insight and sympathy
*Guardian*
A hugely ambitious first novel
*Bookseller*
Owuor's eye catches an abundance of rich detail and the suffering
of the characters is leavened by the prose
*TLS*
This is a book in which multiple stories are told on almost every
page. One of Owuor's greatest achievements is that she reveals
repeatedly how multi-faceted human beings and the things they
create are. This is nowhere more evident than in her presentation
of Kenya, a place that is at once the site of great suffering and
corruption, but also of extraordinary love, forbearance, beauty and
humour. Insights leap from the page, frequently launched from only
a handful of well-chosen words: [...] in the wake of the violence
that splintered it, Kenya is a nation 'that is gluing its cracked
shell together again'. The book is often very funny too. Owuor is a
great conjurer of characters [and her] writing is at its most
beautiful when it treats of the desert landscape, where the 'wind
lumbers past like an ancient wizard' and the dusk comes 'plodding
in and scarring the sky with yellow-orange trails'. The place is
soaked in imagination. Indeed, as we follow the characters over the
rocky terrain, it often seems as if we are wandering through a vast
psyche rather than a physical region.
*A Year of Reading the World*
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