Weight of Whispers by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
March 24, 2008
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
March 23, 2008
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.
