How to Write About Africa by Binyavanga Wainaina

Author: Binyavanga Wainaina
Series: Kwanini

This trio of sharp-witted essays takes irony to a new level. In How to Write About Africa, Wainaina dissects the African clichés and preconceptions dear to western writers and readers with a ruthless precision. Read more

You in America by Chimamanda Adichie

Author: Chimamanda Adichie
Series: Kwanini

This is a love story disguised as a travelogue, the tale of a young Nigerian woman who wins a lottery whose prize is a green card to America. Does everyone there own a big house, a big car, and a gun? Not quite, though it turns out there are worse things than guns. Chimamanda Adichie takes us effortlessly from the shanties of Lagos to downtown Connecticut, where love – uninvited but not unwelcome – turns up to eat at a restaurant.

Weight of Whispers by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

Author: Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
Series: Kwanini
Awards: 2003 Caine Prize

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor followed Wainaina’s example by winning the 2003 Caine Prize with her evocative tale of a Rwandan aristocrat who fled to Kenya in the wake of the 1994 genocide. The characters in Weight of Whispers come draped in history, wrapping the world’s dramas around their own as they struggle to adjust to their lengthy fall from grace. In this story of exile and death, Owuor draws us masterfully into a quest for light, and life.

Discovering Home by Binyavanga Wainaina

Author: Binyavanga Wainaina
Series: Kwanini
Awards: Winner of the 2002 Caine Prize for African fiction

Winner of the 2002 Caine Prize for African fiction, Discovering Home tells the Kenyan version of that universal story: returning home and seeing it for the first time. By turns compassionate and bitingly ironic, this Kwanini takes readers on a whirlwind journey from Rift Valley to Maasailand and beyond. Along the way, the social geography underlying family relations, political contacts, the Ndombolo dance and the Sunday sermon are revealed in all their solemn hilarity.