Stanley Gazemba

A train is huffing and puffing across the Kenyan landscape. It looks like something out of the early colonial era, but inside it is fitted with everything a modern passenger could wish for. Aboard are people from all corners of the nation and walks of life. They have traversed radically different paths to get here: worked in the gloomy warehouses of Nairobi’s industrial districts, made drug deals in the foothills of the country’s mountains, migrated from their upcountry villages to the city. Their stories are entangled with those of the people who were not fortunate enough to win a ticket – mothers and fathers, street hustlers and gangsters, generous strangers and mysterious lovers. Footprints in Sand is a story of Kenya at the turn of the millennium, about crime and corruption, hope and ambition, pasts that its people try to leave behind and the future for which they wait. This novel, long in the making, is a modern Kenyan epic that travels along forking paths and between genres and modes of storytelling. It is an indictment of postcolonial greed, a crime novel without a villain and a fairy-tale about enchanted objects and dangerous encounters.