For our May pick, Zeda Book Club dove into Things They Lost, the lush and haunting debut novel by Kenyan writer Okwiri Oduor. Our café pick for our meetup was Knead Artisanal Bakery at Hyatt Place in Westlands. Set in the fictional town of Mapeli, the book is part gothic fable, part coming-of-age tale, and part magical exploration of grief, trauma, and inherited pain. With hypnotic prose and surreal flourishes, Okwiri guides us through the world of Ayosa, a lonely girl raised by ghosts, silence, and a mother who disappears as easily as she returns.
What immediately stood out to us was the novel’s dreamlike atmosphere. Oduor conjures a world that feels both familiar and strange, a Kenya shaped by colonial residues and spiritual unrest, but also a town brimming with its own peculiarities: women with otherworldly powers, ghostly presences, and shadowy histories. The novel resists linearity and embraces the surreal, drawing comparisons to Toni Morrison’s Beloved or Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater in its exploration of memory and haunting.
At the heart of the book is the aching, layered relationship between Ayosa and her mother Nabuka. This is a mother-daughter bond shaped by abandonment, mental illness, tenderness, cruelty, and longing. Nabuka is both captivating and cruel, she vanishes for days, speaks in riddles, and struggles to love her daughter in any stable or nurturing way. Ayosa, meanwhile, yearns for affection and connection, searching for warmth in the ghosts of her ancestral home and in fleeting interactions with others.
This theme of complicated mother-daughter dynamics deeply resonated with us at Zeda Book Club. We reflected on how motherhood, especially in African contexts, is often idealized, yet can be a site of deep generational pain. Nabuka is not the nurturing mother archetype; she is wounded, chaotic, and often frightening. And yet, Oduor renders her with nuance, never casting her as merely a villain. Through Ayosa’s eyes, we witness both devastation and desire, for a mother who can stay, and for a childhood not shaped by fear.
The women in this novel, both living and spectral, carry their losses in their bodies and memories. The town itself seems built on the bones of forgotten women, their stories simmering beneath the surface. Ayosa’s journey becomes not just a search for maternal love, but also a reckoning with the histories that haunt her, and the decision to reclaim her voice amidst that silence.
Verdict
Things They Lost is not a conventional novel. It demands patience, openness, and a willingness to be led by emotion rather than plot. But for those who surrender to its rhythm, it is a breathtaking, immersive experience. Okwiri Oduor writes with a poetic cadence that lingers long after the final page, her sentences are incantations, her characters unforgettable.
At Zeda Book Club, this novel opened up rich conversations about mothering, loneliness, girlhood, and healing. We talked about the invisible burdens women carry, the ways we are haunted by what is unspoken, and the courage it takes to break cycles of silence.
For readers who love literary fiction that blends myth, memory, and the mystical, Things They Lost is a must-read. It’s a powerful debut from one of Kenya’s most gifted literary voices.
Zeda Book Club is open to women to join. We café hop and read a new book each month. We meet on the first Sunday of every month in Nairobi. Join the group here. Happy reading!
