Books with author Stanley Gazemba

Long-listed for the Macmillan Prize, Stanley Gazemba's five-star-rated Grandmother's Winning Smile is the story of a poor Kenyan village boy, who overcomes incredible odds to emerge one of the top students in the country in his school exams, thanks to the ingenuity and stubborn resolve of his illiterate but proud grandmother. When Kinuthia’s father sold the family cow and deserted them to look for a job in the city, Kinuthia thought that all his hopes for an education and a bright future had come crashing down. The cow had been the family’s sole income earner. Now he was stuck with his ageing grandmother for a relative. The only option left was to drop out of school and join the work gangs in search of a job at the flower farm that had recently opened in his village in Central Kenya. Kinuthia’s grandmother had other plans for her only grandson. Grandmother’s Winning Smile is the story of this brave old woman who, though penniless, was gifted with amazing cunning and wit, and whose stubborn pride wouldn’t allow her to let Kinuthia join the work gangs. If you enjoyed the movie “First Grader” you will enjoy this!

The Ghost Engineer of the Railway Museum is an adventure story set at the Nairobi Railway Museum. One day, while on a visit to the museum with his family, Zeddy Chengo, while wandering through the old locomotives displayed in the museum yard, comes across a curious old man who not only claims to have survived a famous attack by the dreaded man-eater lions of Tsavo, but dares him to take a ride on one of the locomotives with him the coming Sunday. It is The Mount Shengena, the biggest locomotive at the museum, and which he claims to have revived into running condition. Thrilled, Chengo accepts, allowing himself to be lured into an adventure of a lifetime involving pirates and buried treasure... and skulls as well!