Edmonton-based Iman Verjee’s 2012 debut, In Between Dreams (which won the U.K.’s Peters Fraser and Dunlop/City University Prize for fiction), is set in a sleepy Canadian town. The novelist’s sophomore effort, Who Will Catch Us as We Fall, vividly brings to life the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, where Verjee lived until migrating in 2014.

As with In Between Dreams, a girl’s difficult coming of age is central to the new novel’s story. Leena lives in comfort and seclusion within Nairobi’s well-established but resented Indian community, until she finds herself drawn to the son of her family’s black maid. Studies in England further challenge her world view, before a shocking incident threatens to define and confine her. This episode, cast in the garb of an unspeakable secret, can be divined within the novel’s first few chapters; the strength of this device is in the way it subtly draws the story’s characters together.

In addition to Leena, the narrative focuses on the maid’s resilient and gifted son, Michael, who grows up to be a daring master of political street art, and Jefferey, a police officer who succumbs to the darkest recesses of the city’s pervasive corruption. Several others play important roles, particularly Leena’s parents and brother, who are integral to the novel’s tug-of-war between the forces of conservatism and change. All the book’s characters are remarkably authentic – even minor players such as a charismatic but deceitful student activist and a young man ostracized because of his sexuality.

This verisimilitude is achieved, in part, by well-crafted chronological shifts across 12 years. Events in 1995 and the early 2000s are bookended by sections set in the year 2007. Leena and Michael evolve from children to young adults, and Jefferey from idealistic rookie to corrupt senior officer. At first merely distant, despicable, or weak, these three quickly become well-developed figures as their pasts unfold on the page.

Who Will Catch Us as We Fall is driven by character and plot, but it also has a strong sense of place, packed with a rich array of sights, sounds, and smells. This is especially true of Leena’s childhood home and the rest of the tight-knit Indian community, which Verjee brings to life via incidental but evocative descriptions: the scent of spices, colourful saris, and the sound of cricket balls smacking against wooden bats. Michael’s effect on Leena is revealed with telling references to his beautiful hands, or the bright flower he puts in her hair.

The moment of greatest sensory impact, however, is entirely unpleasant, confronting the reader emphatically with Nairobi’s danger and desperation. Leena opens her car window slightly while stuck in traffic and becomes the victim of well-practised young thieves armed with bottles of urine – a remarkably effective weapon in the scenario Verjee describes. At various times over the course of the novel, human waste becomes a potent indicator of how low those in the slums have sunk.

The contrast of life in the city’s different social stratas – including a scrabbling lower-middle-class and the affluent elite made up of merchants, expats, and corrupt leaders – is well illustrated, and as characters move about the city and through time, their fortunes change. Resentment of the haves, fear of the have-nots, desire to move up a rung or two on the social ladder, passion for change centred on justice and equality, and the prioritization of African, Indian, or European culture are sentiments that inform the novel’s primary themes.

But the important theme of identity – and its related theme of love – is not explored with the depth that this otherwise thoughtful, well-written novel seems to promise. Verjee’s characters occasionally offer obvious insights that cross over into cliché: some things are more valuable than their cost, and it is wrong to judge someone by the colour of their skin.

A more minor criticism is that, while the strong sense of place Verjee conjures from her youthful experiences is one of the novel’s great strengths, she occasionally loses her sense of space. The opening sentence, for example, demands that readers simultaneously look through Leena’s eyes at Nairobi’s airport as her plane descends, while also watching the plane’s contrail. Despite a handful of such jarring missteps, this book is written in clear, direct language. A smattering of Swahili, either translated or understandable in context, does much to heighten the feeling of littérature vérité.

Notwithstanding the sense that it could have achieved more, Who Will Catch Us as We Fall is a fine novel. It will appeal to those with a fondness for African literature, in particular the writing of Nigeria’s Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who grapples with similar themes in a distinctly sub-Saharan African milieu. For those unfamiliar with literature from this part of the world, or indeed the place itself, this is a strong introduction.