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The Beasts Under Your Bed by JM Rogoi
Brief Summary
Every day, the populace wakes before dawn to head to the blast furnaces of Nairobi’s Industrial Area leaving behind another bustling economy of daily subsistence carried on by the not so lucky. The drinking dens gobble up what they so work hard for and the cycle continues.
The Beasts Under Your Bed follows the travails of one such young man raised in these cesspool that he refuses, is helpless or unable to say goodbye to. He looks for love and light at the end of the bottle and carnal and filial relations. Will he find what he’s looking for? Will he finally manage to escape the chains that so tie him to ‘a man can leave the village but the village cannot leave the man?’
Dance of the Monkeys by Ciku Kimeria
From the author of the well-acclaimed, unputdownable, Of Goats and Poisoned Oranges, comes this gripping mystery novel that will have you on the edge of your seat! A fancy Nairobi engagement party turns deadly. What is to be a special night for Mwende and her fiancé, Oti, takes an unexpected twist.
Private investigator, Wanjiru Mdaku, is in a race against time to find the culprit out to get Mwende, the daughter of the infamous local businessman, Al Capone wa County.
In trying to solve this mystery, Wanjiru Mdaku finds herself navigating treacherous waters of the Lamu drug world, county mafia, political rivalries, a well-connected megachurch and countless love triangles. Can our heroine solve this mystery before the culprit gets Mwende?
Travelling While Black By Nanjala Nya...
Travelling While Black: Essays Inspired by a Life on the Move.
What does it feel like to move through a world designed to limit and exclude you? What are the joys and pains of holidays for people of colour, when guidebooks are never written with them in mind? How are black lives today impacted by the othering legacy of colonial cultures and policies? What can travel tell us about our sense of self, of home, of belonging and identity? Why has the world order become hostile to human mobility, as old as humanity itself, when more people are on the move than ever?
Nanjala Nyabola is constantly exploring the world, working with migrants and confronting complex realities challenging common assumptions - both hers and others'. From Nepal to Botswana, Sicily to Haiti, New York to Nairobi, her sharp, humane essays ask tough questions and offer surprising, deeply shocking and sometimes funny answers. It is time we saw the world through her eyes.
Author: Nanjala Nyabola
Premium Tears by Collins Sakwah
While in Canada, safari websites and youtube channels sold to Zuri an image of a utopian Kenya, a land of hospitable people, natural beauty, nd world wonders. Upon arrival, however, she learns that Kenya is a far cry from what she expected.
Unbeknown to her when she falls in love with Aiden, the poorest student in the university was that her father betrothed her to the son of his business partner as part of his business agreement.
When she is forced to choose between saving her fathers shares in a multi-million real estate company and the man she loves, she chooses to follow her heart. Her quest for love leads her into making discoveries within her fathers real estate company that threaten her life and those of her loved ones.
One Day I Will Write About This Place...
Binyavanga Wainaina tumbled through his middle-class Kenyan childhood out of kilter with the world around him.This world came to him as a chaos of loud and colourful sounds: the hair dryers at his mother's beauty parlour, black mamba bicycle bells, mechanics in Nairobi, the music of Michael Jackson - all punctuated by the infectious laughter of his brother and sister. He could fall in with their patterns, but it would take him a while to carve out his own.
In this vivid and compelling debut, Wainaina takes us through his school days, his failed attempt to study in South Africa, a moving family reunion in Uganda, and his travels around Kenya.
The landscape in front of him always claims his main attention, but he also evokes the shifting political scene that unsettles his views on family, tribe, and nationhood. Throughout, reading is his refuge and his solace. And when, in 2002, a writing prize comes through, the door is opened for him to pursue the career that perhaps had been beckoning all along. Resolutely avoiding stereotype and cliche, Wainaina paints every scene in One Day I Will Write About This Place with a highly distinctive and hugely memorable brush.
The River and the Source by Margaret ...
In 1995, this novel won both the Jomo Kenyatta Literature Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize Best First Book in the Africa Region. Now reprinted, it remains in great demand.
An epic story spanning cultures, it tells the lives of three generations of women.
It traces the story of Akoko in her rich traditional Luo setting, through to the children who live and die in the 20th century.
When I learned how to walk and other ...
Brief Summary
'When I learned how to walk & other poems', is a compilation of 17 poems written by myself (I have been a performing spoken word poet in Nairobi for the past 5 years, and this is my debut poetry book).
The poems in this book span a wide range of topics, from African power, love, identity, mental health, and the inevitability of heartbreak.
The book is a small one, 61 pages, however, it contains poems that are meant to be re-read as many times as the reader wishes. The book is largely in English, and contains a few lines in Swahili, with one of the poems being entirely in Swahili.
ISBN:9789914700473
Author: Mumbi Macharia
The Havoc of Choice by Wanjiru Koinange
Long held captive by her father’s shadow of corruption, Kavata has spent her life suffocated by political machinations. When her husband decides to run in the next election, these shadows threaten to consume her home. Unable to bear this darkness, Kavata plots to escape.
As her family falls apart, so too does her country. In the wake of Kenya‘s post-election turmoil, Kavata and her family must find their way back to each other across a landscape of nation-wide confusion, desperation, and heart-rending loss.
Koinange explores the long reach and effects of colonization and corruption within the context of a singular household and the disparate experiences of class and clan they encapsulate.
"The Havoc of Choice is a delicate and deeply personal attempt to understand the root of this spontaneous yet organized conflict and to figure out what healing looks like for the people of Kenya" - Champaca Bookstore Library & Cafe
How To Kill Children Not an instructi...
South Bs Finest by Makena Maganjo
Nairobi in the 1990s.
Three families.
Their lives interweave as the find themselves living across from each other in an idyllic middle-class neighbourhood, Malaba Estate, South B.
As the decade charges on, their lives begin to show similarities in the secrets they keep and the mistakes they make.
Funny. Thought-provoking. Surprising. Endearing.
This is a coming of age story about friendship in all of its varied shades and intrigues. It is the kind of story that you try to savour only to gallop through the pages -- enchanted by characters, gripped by the authors enticing style.
Makena Maganjo is definitely a worthy addition to the corpus of African writers, and South B?s Finest is a fine work of art!
My First Time by Janet Mbugua
Storytelling can be a powerful tool in influencing policy. "My First Time" brings together 50 voices who narrated their stories on a topic that is to date highly taboo, but have a place in changing perceptions.
These stories, once internalized, have the potential to improve the lives of millions, not only in Kenya but around the world, in putting an end to period poverty.
'It takes a thousand voices to tell a single story' - American Indian saying.
The Double Cross by Mwangi Gicheru
An Artist of the Floating World by Ka...
In the face of the misery in his homeland, the artist Masuji Ono was unwilling to devote his art solely to the celebration of physical beauty. Instead, he put his work in the service of the imperialist movement that led Japan into World War II.
Now, as the mature Ono struggles through the aftermath of that war, his memories of his youth and of the "floating world”—the nocturnal world of pleasure, entertainment, and drink—offer him both escape and redemption, even as they punish him for betraying his early promise.
Indicted by society for its defeat and reviled for his past aesthetics, he relives the passage through his personal history that makes him both a hero and a coward but, above all, a human being.
Memories we lost and other stories by...
This anthology brings together a variety of short stories from Africa and parts of the world. A rigorous and informed selection has ensured that it combines the confidence of The classic's with the freshness that contemporary writers bring to their craft.
This collection is a grain-store of memories that seek to entertain, provoke, empower and educate. The themes are s wide ranging as the authors' backgrounds but they share a common belief — enhancing values and integrity in today's society in an effort to preserve human and social dignity.'
The short story is probably the world's secret weapon in the way that the oral culture is interwoven into the written text, to be enjoyed for education as well as a good read.
The Dragonfly Sea by Yvonne Adhiambo ...
Brief Summary
From the award-winning author of Dust comes a vibrant, stunning coming-of-age novel about a young woman struggling to find her place in a vast world--a poignant exploration of fate, mortality, love, and loss.
On the island of Pate, off the coast of Kenya, lives solitary, stubborn Ayaana and her mother, Munira. When a sailor named Muhidin, also an outsider, enters their lives, Ayaana finds something she has never had before: a father. But as Ayaana grows into adulthood, forces of nature and history begin to reshape her life and the island itself--from a taciturn visitor with a murky past to a sanctuary-seeking religious extremist, from dragonflies to a tsunami, from black-clad kidnappers to cultural emissaries from China.
Ayaana ends up embarking on a dramatic ship's journey to the Far East, where she will discover friends and enemies; be seduced by the charming but unreliable scion of a powerful Turkish business family; reclaim her devotion to the sea; and come to find her own tenuous place amid a landscape of beauty and violence and surprising joy.
Told with a glorious lyricism and an unerring sense of compassion, The Dragonfly Sea is a transcendent story of adventure, fraught choices, and of the inexorable need for shelter in a dangerous world.
Of pawns and players by Kinyanjui Kom...
Kinyanjui Kombani’s newest novel Of Pawns and Players is now available for pre-order. This is the third novel from the Nairobi, Kenya based author popularly known as the "banker who writes”.
Kinyanjui Kombani is a Kenyan novelist, playwright, scriptwriter, and literature activist. He burst onto the scene in 2004 with his debut novel The Last Villains of Molo one of the few pieces of art that have been produced about Kenya’s first post-election crisis in 1991. We loved it.
He followed in 2013 with Den of Inequities a book that follows a killer gang in Nairobi that we also loved.
Apart from fiction for adults, he wrote two books for children in 2007 Wangari Maathai: Mother of Trees a biography of Kenya’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai and We Can Be Friends: Theme, Spread of HIV/AIDS. He also wrote a Young Adult book called Finding Columbia which won the Burt Award for Young Adult Literature in Accra, Ghana last year.
The author’s new novel Of Pawns and Players tackles the underground world of betting in the simple and humorous narrative style that has made him a household name in contemporary fiction.
Digital Democracy Analogue Politics H...
From the upheavals of recent national elections to the success of the #MyDressMyChoice feminist movement, digital platforms have already had a dramatic impact on political life in Kenya – one of the most electronically advanced countries in Africa.
While the impact of the Digital Age on Western politics has been extensively debated, there is still little appreciation of how it has been felt in developing countries such as Kenya, where Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp and other online platforms are increasingly a part of everyday life.
Written by a respected Kenyan activist and researcher at the forefront of political online struggles, this book presents a unique contribution to the debate on digital democracy. For traditionally marginalised groups, particularly women and people with disabilities, digital spaces have allowed Kenyans to build new communities which transcend old ethnic and gender divisions. But the picture is far from wholly positive.
Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics explores the drastic efforts being made by elites to contain online activism, as well as how ‘fake news’, a failed digital vote-counting system and the incumbent president's recruitment of Cambridge Analytica contributed to tensions around the 2017 elections.
Reframing digital democracy from the African perspective, Nyabola’s ground-breaking work opens up new ways of understanding our current global online era.
