Dust - Tapa dura

'In this dazzling novel you will find the entirety of human experience - tearshed, bloodshed, lust, love - in staggering proportions' -- Taiye Selasi, author of Ghana Must Go

'Visceral and moving... this is an unforgettable book, full of love and full of pain' --Binyavanga Wainaina, author of One Day I Will Write About This Place

'Refreshing... As personal histories untangle, it is the Kenyan landscape itself that pushes forward - a sun-razed, bloodied and unknowable presence that at times seems to have spirited itself into Owuor's simultaneously earthy and other-worldly prose. Owuor is a welcome new voice' --Metro

'Moving debut novel... It's a complex story full of rich characters and magical prose' --'Holiday Reads' in Cruise International

'Refreshing... As personal histories untangle, it is the Kenyan landscape itself that pushes forward - a sun-razed, bloodied and unknowable presence that at times seems to have spirited itself into Owuor's simultaneously earthy and other-worldly prose. Owuor is a welcome new voice' --Metro

'A richly evocative debut novel... Owuor's language is pungent, poetic, almost synaesthetic. The density of her language provides the novel's main delight. A subtle, sensitive portrait of Kenya' ****

'The power of Dust derives from its prose...Flashes of memory and the feelings of a moment give rise to recollections of other times and places. The portrait that this fragmented style builds of Kenya rings true in its contradictions, the quotidian mingling regularly with the dramatic: birds chirp while machine guns fire, warm winds blow while brothers are buried. Owuor's eye catches an abundance of rich detail and the suffering of the characters is leavened by the prose.' -- TLS --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

Kenya, 2007. Odidi Oganda, running for his life, is gunned down in the streets of Nairobi. His sister, Ajany, and their father bring his body back home, to a crumbling colonial house in northern Kenya. But the peace they seek is hard to find: the murder has stirred deeply buried memories of colonial violence, of the killing-sprees of the Mau Mau uprising, and the shocking political assassination of Tom Mboya in 1969. When a young Englishman appears, searching for his missing father, another story, of love, or at least a connection, begins. This is a spellbinding state of the nation novel about Kenya, showing how the violence of the past informs the violence and disorder of the present. Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor's memorable characters; Ajany's mother, deranged with grief and past violations, the Trader, embodying the timeless nomadic traders of Sudan, and Odidi himself, who transcended his past, came to success, and then a tragic end, are enchanting. Owuor reveals to us a new Kenya, a Kenya of bloodshed but also of modernity, suffused with a spirit world only half-remembered. This is a country where the characters listen so acutely for what is not said, and for the voices from the distant and recent past.