The Dragonfly Sea

By Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

Book Overview

NAMED A REAL SIMPLE BOOK OF THE YEAR

From the award-winning author of Dust comes a vibrant, stunning coming-of-age novel about a young woman struggling to find her place in a vast world--a poignant exploration of fate, mortality, love, and loss.

On the island of Pate, off the coast of Kenya, lives solitary, stubborn Ayaana and her mother, Munira. When a sailor named Muhidin, also an outsider, enters their lives, Ayaana finds something she has never had before: a father. But as Ayaana grows into adulthood, forces of nature and history begin to reshape her life and the island itself--from a taciturn visitor with a murky past to a sanctuary-seeking religious extremist, from dragonflies to a tsunami, from black-clad kidnappers to cultural emissaries from China. Ayaana ends up embarking on a dramatic ship's journey to the Far East, where she will discover friends and enemies; be seduced by the charming but unreliable scion of a powerful Turkish business family; reclaim her devotion to the sea; and come to find her own tenuous place amid a landscape of beauty and violence and surprising joy. Told with a glorious lyricism and an unerring sense of compassion, The Dragonfly Sea is a transcendent story of adventure, fraught choices, and of the inexorable need for shelter in a dangerous world.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0451494040
• ISBN13: 9780451494047
• Release Date: March 2019
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Length: 512 Pages
• Weight: 2.04 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.8" x 6.6" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A young girl growing up in Africa..and being sent to China for an education

This is wonderfully written tale of a young girl as she grows up with her somewhat crazy mother...and adopted "father"......and eventually making a long strange trip to China...for an education...Many facets to this beautifully written book..