“Billy Kahora is a painter with words. He makes the reader see and touch and smell and feel characters and their inner turmoil as they try to survive, against the challenges of nature and nurture.”—Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
“An engaging read that captivates with its honest humour and ingenuity of narration. The author’s use of language effortlessly blends English and Kiswahili in such a way that he never loses his reader. In this, Kahora matches Junot Diaz’s brilliance in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, in which you can ably comprehend Spanish in an Anglophone narrative. The realism and the humorous rendition of ordinary lives in the stories recall the genius of Zakes Mda in Ways of Dying, Fred Khumalo’s Talk of the Town, and Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, making this is a landmark text that breathes life into the canon of African literature.”—Wesley Macheso, Africa in Words
“Billy Kahora’s stories immerse us in a surreal, heady, wry, often beautiful, sometimes brutal, always surprising world. This is a millennial Kenya we’ve never seen in fiction before: drunks and zealots, farmers and whistleblowers, locals and migrants, mothers and brothers, the rich and the poor and those who slip in between. This prismatic picture of Kenyans—especially their class politics—feels startlingly precise: yes, this is exactly how people talk and hustle and love and falter. A wondrous collection.”—Namwali Serpell, author of The Old Drift