Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owour

About Yvonne Adhiambo Owour

Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owour

Dust begins with an assassination — a young man shot down on the streets of Nairobi — and follows his sister Ajany as she travels home to the drought-ravaged Northern Kenya to bring his body back. Along the way, buried family secrets and decades of political violence surface. Dust was shortlisted for the Folio Prize in 2015 and won the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature. (Booksafricana) Owuor's writing is dense, gorgeous, and deeply demanding — her sentences carry multiple layers of meaning, and her portrait of Kenya is unsparing in its beauty and its horror. The novel spans decades of Kenyan history, from colonial times through the chaos of post-election violence, making it both an intimate family story and an epic national reckoning. It is a novel to be read slowly and experienced fully, one of the most important Kenyan novels of the 21st century.