And This Is How to Stay Alive

In & This is How to Stay Alive by Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Nyokabi's world unravels after her brother Baraka's death by suicide. When an eccentric auntie gives Nyokabi a potion that sends her back in time to when Baraka was still alive, it becomes her only goal to keep him that way. Nyokabi learns that storytellers may be the carriers of time, but defying the past comes with its own repercussions.

Praise:

A beautiful and rending look at family, loss, and grief, all while sharply dissecting time travel tropes and delivering a powerful message about memory, storytelling, and responsibility. It's a story that hurts in the best of ways, confronting death and healing without losing its sense of humor or its impulse for rebellion.
--Charles Payseur, author of The Burning Day and Other Stories

& This is How to Stay Alive is a powerful manual for recovering from grief, exploring intergenerational trauma, and traveling through time. Kagunda's prose is intense and relatable; you'll feel like you're jumping through time with these characters. The perfect read for anyone and everyone.
--Eboni Dunbar, author of Stone and Steel

Highly inventive and brilliantly crafted. Kagunda pushes the envelope in this exceptional novella, playing with time and form as she explores grief and the drama of the human condition.
--Tendai Huchu, author of The Hairdresser of Harare

Rich with the beauty and harshness of life.
--Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Friday Black

Shingai Njeri Kagunda is an Afrofuturist freedom dreamer, Swahili sea lover, and Femme Storyteller among other things, hailing from Nairobi, Kenya. She is currently pursuing a Literary Arts MFA at Brown University. Shingai's short story Holding Onto Water was longlisted for the Nommo Awards 2020 & her flash fiction Remember Tomorrow in Seasons was shortlisted for the Fractured Lit Prize 2020. She has been selected as a candidate for the Clarion UCSD Class of 2020/2021. #clarionghostclass. She is also the co-founder of Voodoonauts: an afrofuturist workshop for black writers.