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 past: 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.