Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

"From the award-winning author of Dust comes a vibrant, stunningly global novel about a young woman struggling to find her place--a poignant exploration of fate, mortality, love, and loss. On the small island of Pate, off the coast of Kenya, lives a girl named Ayaana. She is solitary and stubborn--she and her mother, Munira, are outcasts from the insular local society--and her kitten is her main companion. When a wizened sailor named Muhidin, also an outsider, enters their lives, Ayaana receives what she has long hoped for: a father. But this makeshift family's happiness crumbles as Ayaana grows into adulthood and the threats against her begin to mount: from an Islamic extremist, from the black-clad strangers who kidnap Muhidin's son, from a human trafficker, from the simmering resentments of those around her. So when a contingent of cultural emissaries from China invite Ayaana abroad, she embarks on a dramatic ship's journey to the Far East, where she will make friends and enemies; be seduced by the mercurial scion of a powerful Turkish business family; be initiated into a world of intrigue and passion and high stakes; and, at last, find understanding where she least expects it. Her one constant remains her devotion to the sea, which pulls her across the globe in search of a place where she can love and be loved. The Dragonfly Sea is a transcendent, gloriously told story of adventure, fraught choices, and of the inexorable need for shelter in a dangerous world"--

A Novel

The Dragonfly Sea

Alexander Olando

It was during that sleepless, joyful night that he realized the extent to which he had underestimated the force of love, its pain and dreadful persistence, and how much like fear it also was.

Absolutely love Ayaana and Muhidin’s love 🥰

He watched her gazing at him. There was the panic, and then a spark of elation from at last knowing what it was to be seen by another, to be truly seen. Seizing the moment, not the future and its consequences, he let go, wordless. He nodded.

Marion

One hot and humid day, ari, a student of marine engineering from India, observed that the Maritime Silk Road initiative subsumed the Indian Ocean—he had emphasized "Indian" —to "others." "It is not for nothing that the ocean is called Indian," he noted.

Ayaana retorted, "Ziwa Kuu?" Ari turned to her. "Oogle Boogle?"

"Ziwa Kuu." Ayaana refused to cede territory.

Ari said, "We'll discuss that with your good self the day your country acquires a motorboat to start a navy."

"Doubtless its fish bounties are commendable, but what else?" Titters.

Two Pakistani students chimed in: "Ziwa Kuu!"

The class slipped into an uproar that did not change Chinese foreign policy. The lecturer, who had watched the disintegration of order in his class in disbelief, his face becoming blotchy, at last screamed,

The Dragonfly Sea quotes

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