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Welcome

Zamani Chronicles is delighted to announce the publication of Rain – A Song for All and None, by Adoyo.

A poetic meditation on History through the lens of Oral Tradition, Rain is crafted from the song of storytellers born on the shores of Nam Lolwe, the Great Lake at the eye of the Nile in the heart of East Africa.

Welcome to this unique adventure in storytelling where a multitude of voices join the traditional storyteller’s voice to lend their distinct accents to a collective chorus, each sounding sometimes in harmony, sometimes in counterpoint, and other times still in dissonance with one another.

Readers and listeners have spoken: Rain will take you places!

The Story

The first volume in the Dream Walker Canticle series, Rain is the story of the Dream Walker Maya, one of history’s empathic clairvoyants who experiences the story of humanity through the eyes of other Dreamers, unlimited by time or distance.

Born of the Great Lake Nam Lolwe in the heart of Africa into a modern world that has no place for her kind, Maya finds herself adrift in Time without the guidance she needs to understand the purpose of her extraordinary abilities.

Under the guidance of ancestral Spirits, Maya strives to find her bearings as she is swept up in the thousand-year saga of the devastatingly insidious legacies of colonizing empires that continue to ravage her home. Braving uncharted waters, Maya discovers illuminating truths concealed behind the veil of History’s public myths.

Her quest unites her across the centuries with ancestral Dream Walkers who will teach her to understand the power of her gifts, and Maya learns to fulfill her destiny as a visionary steward of both the Past and the Future in an ever-changing world.

Family Tree: JokOlóo and JokOmolo

Book Club & Reviews

Reviews are in…

Rain, the book’s most prominent symbol, is life and death, is past, present, and future. It is a “living being” both distinct and indistinct from all others. Maya struggles to control and make sense of her gift, to find her footing in the world of Time, because she is still coming to understand the paradoxes here embodied.

Quoting China Achebe in her epigraph —“Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter,” — Adoyo makes clear that she sees her work in the tradition of writers like Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o who have sought through their fiction to counter and reverse the hegemonic European perspective on African history.

In the midst of themes both historical and spiritual, what I admired most in Rain was the imagery and musicality of its prose. Adoyo is attentive to sound in language.

Not only the sound, but the imagery is poetic; she combines the senses, whether creating a sense of hope and calm in describing “hearing the light dance on the water” or a sense of horror and chaos in describing the smells of blood and smoke in other passages. Her language is occasionally even playfully self-aware, as when she describes one character’s name as forming “dactylic tetrameter.”

“Rain” asks its reader to expand her definition of narrative, but it also rewards her for doing so… let go of your expectations. Stop trying to fit this book into a box, and just sit back and enjoy the ride.

… READ MORE…

Continue reading “Book Club & Reviews”

The Storyteller

ADOYO is a storyteller, musician and artist who finds happiness when drawing, playing the piano, and listening to stories.

Born and raised in Kenya, Adoyo attended Hill School in Eldoret (Rift Valley) and Alliance Girls High School in Kikuyu (Central Province). Her education in music composition and literary scholarship continued as an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis where she studied Music and Italian Literature. She then completed a Masters and a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University in Massachusetts.

Adoyo teaches Medieval literature of the Romance Languages and lectures on Dante’s poetics. Her next book, Dante Decrypted : The Order of All Things, is a work of literary scholarship based on her doctoral dissertation about Dante Alighieri’s musical design for the textual architecture of his masterpiece, the Commedia.

Contact the author directly via email at : [email protected]