Unverified
David Muli has done everything right.
A good education. A good career. A girlfriend his mother adores, and a father who tells everyone, "My son is doing well."
Then, on the day he is offered the promotion he has spent six years earning, David feels nothing at all. On Monday he says no. He cannot explain why, because nothing went wrong.
He leaves Nairobi with a backpack, a torch his girlfriend packed for him, and no plan. In Machakos a landlady decides he is a teacher. In Mombasa he becomes Daudi, from a mountain he has never seen. Every stranger offers him a different man to be, and for a while being nobody feels like freedom. Then his wallet is stolen, and without an ID card the police have a word for what he is.
In a creek-side hostel in Kilifi he meets Mara, a woman who has spent years making herself impossible to find. Nobody there asks anyone anything. It is the first rule David has ever found easy to keep. But the past does not stay buried in places where nobody asks. And the people he tried to leave behind are still carrying their share of the weight: a father who loves him in the only language he has, a brother who gave up more than he ever said, and a girlfriend with a plan of her own.
Unverified is a quiet, funny, unsentimental novel about family, obligation and belonging, set across Kenya from the matatu stages of Nairobi to the red soil of Kitui. It asks what is left of a man when the answers he has always given stop being true.
Sooner or later, everyone is asked what they do.
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