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Amapiano Eyes
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 Waikiki, 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 business partner steals their supply, Norrie and Daliso are left in a lurch. With travel bans causing shortages of supply on the island, they scramble to mitigate the damage by selling ecstasy for a former corrupt detective.
Daliso struggles to stay afloat in a world that seems to be crumbling around him. While he contends with a deteriorating heart condition and worries about his aging parents and Norrie, Daliso is plagued with painful memories of his grandfather, who was an exhibit in a Human Zoo. Meanwhile, Norrie is facing her own crisis of her mother's addiction to opiates. Ultimately, the couple must decide whether to continue down a path of violence to resolve the crisis 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 adolescent reckonings in Kenya and Winnipeg and dehumanizing ancestral legacies in Germany. For him, the present is not an effect of the past, but the past lives unsettled with the present.
210 pages, Paperback
Published March 24, 2026
About the author
D. Nandi Odhiambo
6 books5 followersD. Nandi Odhiambo is the author of five novels: Amapiano Eyes (Book*hug Press, 2026), Smells Like Stars (Book*hug Press, 2018), The Reverend's Apprentice (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2008), Kipligat's Chance (Penguin Canada, 2003; St. Martin's Press, 2004), and diss/ed banded nation (Polestar Press, 1998). He has also written The Minoritarian and Black Reason: A Philosophico-Literary Investigation, a work of literary criticism, published by Lexington Books in 2021. He is the recipient of the 2018 Elliot Cades Award for Literature and serves as Professor of English at the University of Hawaiʻi–West Oʻahu.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 24, 2026
Amapiano Eyes defies general genre classification. Its’ story, centering on a young man named Daliso whose family originates from Nairobi, carries the reader through the underbelly of Honolulu with its poverty and drug users that look out at the sunburned tourists, through to the fairly suburban Winnipeg, back through history to human zoos in Germany, all via the beats of Amapiano music.
Daliso and his partner Norrie are dealing drugs in Hawaii and trying to stay ahead of the criminal elements. Daliso and his siblings had at one time come from Nairobi to Winnipeg to record music under their uncle’s label. Daliso’s grandfather was a man who believed in kindness despite not having been dealt that himself. The impact of this elder upon the family and the philosophical leanings of Daliso are all undercurrents of this modern Bonnie and Clyde type story.
One of the themes throughout the five ‘books’ that make up the story is the question of agency and fate. How much control do we have over our lives?
The story is engaging with a well driven plot and the characters of Daliso and Norrie are particularly interesting. I was also drawn to the fine details of the settings/side characters that helped bring it to life (the artist on the sidewalk, the owner of the apt and the roommate of Daliso etc). I can see coming back to this one to think about it more.
Thank you to @bookhugpress for an ARC in exchange for my honest opinions.
Daliso and his partner Norrie are dealing drugs in Hawaii and trying to stay ahead of the criminal elements. Daliso and his siblings had at one time come from Nairobi to Winnipeg to record music under their uncle’s label. Daliso’s grandfather was a man who believed in kindness despite not having been dealt that himself. The impact of this elder upon the family and the philosophical leanings of Daliso are all undercurrents of this modern Bonnie and Clyde type story.
One of the themes throughout the five ‘books’ that make up the story is the question of agency and fate. How much control do we have over our lives?
The story is engaging with a well driven plot and the characters of Daliso and Norrie are particularly interesting. I was also drawn to the fine details of the settings/side characters that helped bring it to life (the artist on the sidewalk, the owner of the apt and the roommate of Daliso etc). I can see coming back to this one to think about it more.
Thank you to @bookhugpress for an ARC in exchange for my honest opinions.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
A Beat Beneath the Bruise
How did the book make me feel/think?
I glance down at the pages. Daliso and Norrie are broken, flailing, surviving out of their element. Survival has seen to that.
My finger drifts across the prose. It looks simple. Effortless. But it hums.
What is prose?
The footnotes teach me to speak Kiswahili (Swahili). I hope it sticks.
A lyrical beat moves beneath everything — a long-shelf-life rhythm — and then it bores into me. Into my chest. Into my memory. A pulchritudinous shock reverberates from desire to belly to soul.
A thriller.
More than that — a song. A beat.
Oceans crossed. Cultures bending. African lives arriving in the melting pot of racism.
History surfaces like a bruise: Europe’s human zoos — art installations of living people — generational damage that still stains the present unless we break the conditioning.
Another beat.
Children bring song.
A boy born into the long shadow of slavery lands in the so-called Great White North and is greeted not by promise, but by late-stage capitalism’s wreckage: people sleeping under cardboard, men screaming at air, small dogs carried like accessories, irony sold as identity.
Then a truck stops.
A tire iron.
A threat.
A reminder that some bodies are still seen as less than human.
Odhiambo writes this reality with startling elegance — the quiet, daily violence of a world that refuses to see the beauty in your voice.
Yes, it’s a thriller.
But it’s also love found in despair. Survival as resistance. Music as memory.
A breathtaking examination of humanity at its cruellest — and its most tender.
A book like no other.
WRITTEN: 8 February 2026
How did the book make me feel/think?
I glance down at the pages. Daliso and Norrie are broken, flailing, surviving out of their element. Survival has seen to that.
My finger drifts across the prose. It looks simple. Effortless. But it hums.
What is prose?
The footnotes teach me to speak Kiswahili (Swahili). I hope it sticks.
A lyrical beat moves beneath everything — a long-shelf-life rhythm — and then it bores into me. Into my chest. Into my memory. A pulchritudinous shock reverberates from desire to belly to soul.
A thriller.
More than that — a song. A beat.
Oceans crossed. Cultures bending. African lives arriving in the melting pot of racism.
History surfaces like a bruise: Europe’s human zoos — art installations of living people — generational damage that still stains the present unless we break the conditioning.
Another beat.
Children bring song.
A boy born into the long shadow of slavery lands in the so-called Great White North and is greeted not by promise, but by late-stage capitalism’s wreckage: people sleeping under cardboard, men screaming at air, small dogs carried like accessories, irony sold as identity.
Then a truck stops.
A tire iron.
A threat.
A reminder that some bodies are still seen as less than human.
Odhiambo writes this reality with startling elegance — the quiet, daily violence of a world that refuses to see the beauty in your voice.
Yes, it’s a thriller.
But it’s also love found in despair. Survival as resistance. Music as memory.
A breathtaking examination of humanity at its cruellest — and its most tender.
A book like no other.
WRITTEN: 8 February 2026
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Amapiano Eyes: A Novel by D. Nandi Odhiambo
The Booksellers List 2026
This novel defies easy categorization. It’s philosophical, literary, noir, thriller, and family saga - an exciting, touching, and thought provoking read.
Daliso and Norrie have been in love since they met in Winnipeg as teens when Daliso was visiting from Nairobi. Now living in Hawaii during the pandemic, they survive by selling drugs and DJing, carving out their own distinctive amapiano sound.
The book’s philosophically minded characters thread conversations with existential questions about life’s path, the overlap of past and present, what can we control and life as a state of chaotic catastrophe. The narrative moves between past and present, revealing family history that adds horrifying depth, including Daliso’s grandfather’s being forced into a Human Zoo, and showing how past trauma’s shape identity and choices.
Norrie is a stand out character, a gun wielding bad ass who is fiercely protective of those she loves.
Fast paced and compelling, the novel blends philosophical musings, the violence of the drug world, family loyalty and a deep love of music into a memorable and genre bending read.
The Booksellers List 2026
This novel defies easy categorization. It’s philosophical, literary, noir, thriller, and family saga - an exciting, touching, and thought provoking read.
Daliso and Norrie have been in love since they met in Winnipeg as teens when Daliso was visiting from Nairobi. Now living in Hawaii during the pandemic, they survive by selling drugs and DJing, carving out their own distinctive amapiano sound.
The book’s philosophically minded characters thread conversations with existential questions about life’s path, the overlap of past and present, what can we control and life as a state of chaotic catastrophe. The narrative moves between past and present, revealing family history that adds horrifying depth, including Daliso’s grandfather’s being forced into a Human Zoo, and showing how past trauma’s shape identity and choices.
Norrie is a stand out character, a gun wielding bad ass who is fiercely protective of those she loves.
Fast paced and compelling, the novel blends philosophical musings, the violence of the drug world, family loyalty and a deep love of music into a memorable and genre bending read.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews