Publisher: Huza Press
Genre: Fiction/Short stories
Number of pages: 303
Publication year: 2019
Billy Kahora’s The Cape Cod Bicycle War And Other Stories is a collection of eleven short stories written over the last decade and a half set across Kenya, South Africa and the United States. Kenyan writer and the former managing editor of Kwani Trust, Billy Kahora, explores the tensions and transitions of lives in between youthful madness and uncertain adulthoods through settings that stretch across the globe, from the Kenyan coast and Nairobi to South Africa, to Cape Cod in the US.
Treadmill Love was commended by the 2007 Caine Prize judges. The story follows a depressed man from a well-to-do family who moves from Limuru to Nairobi’s Buruburu suburb to save his sanity and life and the love he finds there. Two other stories included in the anthology, Urban Zoning, and Gorilla’s Apprentice were shortlisted for the Caine Prize in 2012 and 2014, respectively.
The Gorilla’s Apprentice is about a young man who has an unhealthy love for wild animals, his focus is a gorilla named Sebastian at the Nairobi Animal Orphanage.
We Are Here Because We Are Here is about a coastal community dealing with the effects of flooding. The Red Door is about two men, who grew up in Buruburu and are involved in the trade of growing wheat in Narok. Commission is a fictionalized story of David Munyakei’s widow.
The titular story, The Cape Cod Bicycle War is about immigrants, mainly from third world countries, who move to America and the challenges they face.
Billy Kahora’s observations, through the stories, shine a light on the millennial Kenyan life. The stories are varied in theme, from dealing with mental health to that transition to adulthood. His stories are written from the point of view of a person that has lived it. The collection is, quite simply, genius. The stories are well written and with so much detail that one feels transported to the exact situation, feeling what the protagonists are feeling and rooting for them. For a person that is hungry for stories that are grounded in reality, Billy Kahora is the perfect writer. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I recommend it.