Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea will be available for purchase on March 12, 2019. This will be the second book from the Kenyan writer after her 2014 smash hit Dust.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor burst onto the African literary scene when she won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2003 for her short story Weight of Whispers. She followed it a decade later with Dust, a stunning tale showing a family’s loss as a mirror to a country’s history. That book won the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature in 2015 and was shortlisted for the Folio Prize 2015 and FT/Oppenheimer Fund Emerging Voices.
Followers of the writer have been eagerly waiting for the new manuscript, The Dragonfly Sea which she teased to Kenyan audiences in 2016. The book is currently on Amazon and will be on sale from March next year. The book which is published by Knopf seems to be quite a large tome as it is 512 pages long. Here is the blurb of what promises to be a very good read.
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.
Exciting times with this new work from one of the most promising authors from East Africa. Make your preorder for the book here.
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