Dust opens with Odidi Oganda being shot dead on the streets of Nairobi on the eve of the 2007 election. His family struggles to understand his death and tries to come to terms with it in different ways. At around the same time, Isiah Bolton arrives from England seeking information about his family. Charcaters are forced to confront secrets from their past, which allows the author to explore the colonial and post-colonial history of Kenya. This book was beautifully written, constantly straddling the increasingly blurry line between prose and poetry. But it was also a very challenging book to read - and not just because of the violent incidents in its plot. Owuor doesn't pander to her reader, nor does she believe in explaining or giving a lot for context, particularly upfront. Readers, particularly those not from or familiar with Kenya, have to be patient since the pieces do eventually come together and be prepared to do a little work by Googling unfamiliar words and, events and cultural references - or else be happy going with the flow and not understanding every detail. It's a story that moves back and forwards in time and from one point of view to another without many clues to orient the reader. My advice is to persevere. The effort is well rewarded. The book is rich, it vividly portrays Kenya on the page, and it explores many themes such as loss at both an individual and national level. 

This book really wore down my patience; by the end I was just skim reading. It's really not my kind of book to begin with, and I wouldn't have read it if it weren't for my uni course, but the style of writing really didn't help. Hard to follow what's actually going on to the point that I just got bored, though there were glimmers here and there - though all much closer to the beginning of the book than the end, or even middle - where I got into it for a moment. It just felt more and more aimless the further I read, and hey, maybe that's the point, but I just didn't get anything from it other than boredom.