Accompanied by the deep beats of Amapiano music, D. Nandi Odhiambo's gritty, high-stakes new novel Amapiano Eyes is a masterful blend of literary fiction and noir-an existential thriller where the past and present collide. When the pandemic abruptly arrives, Daliso Okoth, a DJ and existential philosopher living in Waikīkī, loses his job as a construction labourer. At a crossroads, he joins his girlfriend and fellow DJ, Norrie Vee, in her side hustle selling prescription and designer drugs on Oahu. After her supplier steals their stash, Norrie and Daliso are left in a lurch. With travel bans causing supply shortages on the island, they scramble to mitigate the damage by selling dope for a corrupt former detective. Daliso struggles to stay afloat in a world that seems to be crumbling around him. While he contends with a deteriorating heart condition, Daliso is plagued and worries about Norrie and his aging parents, and painful memories of his grandfather, who was exhibited in European human zoos in the early twentieth century. Meanwhile, Norrie is facing her own crisis of her mother's addiction to alcohol and opioids. Ultimately, the couple must decide whether to continue down a path of violence or to choose kindness, as Daliso's grandfather taught him. Daliso's charged present, set against the hyperreal beauty and poverty of Hawai'i, is shot through with the past: adolescent reckonings in Kenya and Winnipeg and dehumanizing ancestral legacies. For him, the present is not an effect of the past, but the past lives unsettled with the present.
