Truth Is A Flightless Bird
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Nice, an eccentric UN worker, involved in the dangerous world of her drug trafficking boyfriend in Mogadishu, is kidnapped by Hinga, a corrupt police officer working for drug lords, and Ciru, a complicated woman with a tragic past of her own. Her old flame Duncan, a white American pastor, in an attempt to save her is uprooted from his expat middle-class bubble and forced to navigate the moral complexities of the Nairobi underground fraught with characters fighting for survival. Set against the impending arrival of President Obama to Kenya, Truth is a Flightless Bird, a crime novel, is an exploration of colonialism and current imperial and capitalist structures that create and perpetuate violence. Truth is a Flightless Bird is a brutal love letter to the frontier town that is present-day Nairobi: a studied observation of the failure of bare-knuckled capitalism, the inequality machines our cities have become, and— ultimately—the profoundly irrational human capacity to hope, to risk everything in order to have something in which to believe. With Truth is a Flightless Bird, Hussain establishes a remarkable voice, one truly his own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hussain's earnest debut dramatizes the fraught social and economic circumstances of modern-day East Africa. Pregnant and scared, Theresa (who goes by Nice), a Canadian U.N. worker in Somalia, travels to Nairobi, Kenya, ostensibly to get an abortion, but her real goal is to escape her controlling, drug dealer boyfriend, Toogood. Tasked with transporting a quarter kilo of Toogood's "bespoke narcotics" and burdened with her secret life, Nice has arranged to meet her college friend, Duncan, an American pastor working at the Westlands Church of the Earth in Kenya, in hopes that he can help her disappear and start a new life with her baby. Soon after Duncan picks up Nice from the Nairobi airport, the pair are ambushed and held by a self-proclaimed healer, Ciru, who attempts to take a cut ofToogood's Kenyan business prospects. After this arresting setup, however, extended backstories and overwrought explanations slow the narrative. President Obama's visit to Kenya acts as a backdrop to the novel's events, but Nice's personal situation and the social implications of this historic visit fail to coalesce. That said, Hussain displays enough stylistic flair to suggest he'll do better next time.
