The Missing Links

by Tobias O. Otieno

The events of this novel are played out against a background of tension and contradiction between the rural and urban experience, squalor and affluence, reality and superstition. Nyakane, a high- school student in Nairobi, falls pregnant and is forced to return to Odendo, village of her husband's forefathers. In the harsh conditions of the village, where the land is unfertile and gold-mining is the only lucrative activity, and educated people are considered dissenters, Nyakane is faced with a world of social taboo, poverty and perpetual disease. Tobias Odongo Otieno, in this, his first novel, portrays the dislocation of the villagers and the city dwellers, and the different generations with humorous affection. He is fearless in satirizing the superstition and taboo born of ignorance, or hypocritical religion, in his quest for a sharpened, more truthful perception of a society in change.

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