G.S.Karagouni


A sunrise over the Mount Kenya



Nancy, a 14-year-old girl, grows in a regional city of Greece with her mother and her little sister Alexandra. As a typical teenager, she thinks that she is overparented and that the system is already rigged against her. Her father, a civil engineer is only occasionally at home; he spends most time of the year directing big projects abroad. Nancy considers her mother to be miserable and despotic. On the other hand, she admires and almost adores her father.




This summer, Nancy is invited by her best friend to spend her holidays on a fantastic Greek island. She dreams a free life away from the over-protective, annoying mom, and she expects to find her first love, her first kiss. Instead, the very same evening of her birthday party and after a hot quarrel with her mother, she is punished to follow her father in Kenya.


Embu, a small village near Mount Kenya, brings her in despair: she is in the middle of nowhere, without a mobile phone or an internet connection, electricity or anything of these little things and facilities a teenager considers necessities in her life. The only new person in her life is a “fairy-shadow”, Niaga, her father’s “house servant”.


Yet, she has forbidden him to talk to her. Isolated in herself, she watches the subtle moments of the quite unusual everyday life, through her dark sunglasses: the wild life around her, women in colorful dresses working the land and disappearing just before sunset. Although her father is here, he is absent from everyday moments; always busy with his work…


However, she is soon captured by the beauty and the mystery of Africa. Her first effort to explore the area around her house is a disaster. She gets lost, rescued by a local woman and then sick with malaria.



Niaga must drive an old banger for the first time in his life to take her to a catholic nunnery. This adventure will be their common secret, which breaks the ice among them.


Nancy’s relation to Africa changes gradually. She meets the local people, enters their houses, joins their “nyama choma” feasts, becomes aware of the beauty of their dialects, their customs and songs. She begins to love wild nature and its animals, but she also tastes the danger of the African jungles. Fascinating safaris, dangerous attacks, painful misunderstandings, emotional conflicts and overturns change Nancy and the way she used to see life:


“I smile. Life is complicated, but really beautiful! Life deserves love, respect and dignity!”


Nancy discovers how indulged in so many trivial things she used to be. She compares her life to the life of the local teenagers who grow up in much different and harder ways, but who laugh more than her friends and have their own ways to find happiness. Through this journey to Africa, quite unconsciously, Nancy starts her own journey to adulthood and self-awareness.


A tender book for girls, moms and men with special feelings, which I hope it will be soon translated and find its way to their hearts.


The book is commented by the Greek literary team.



Review by the Greek Literary Team



The novel “A sunrise over the Mount Kenya” is a quite special novel, graphically touching and full of clashes of emotions a teenager usually experiences. The context is the different and exotic culture of Africa. In a pithy and enjoyable way, the author drives her heroine from adolescence to young adulthood and self-awareness. The sunrise in Embu, Kenya is at the same time her own “sunrise”, since she goes back over things in life and begins with a revised settled way of thinking.