Doorframe Press · Los Angeles
Books by Jayne B Kadenge. One line of work is set in the years around Kenyan independence. The other is a series of guided journals, written so that a mother’s story does not disappear with her.
The novel
Kenya, 1964. The country is months old. A minister has promised his daughter to a man she has never met, and to a country that is not hers.
Albert Kenga is Kenya’s tourism minister, admired for solving whatever lands on his desk. Then his daughter Tatiana turns eighteen, and the solution he has agreed to is a marriage: she will be given to the thirty-four-year-old son of the French foreign minister, an alliance meant to serve two nations at once.
Tatiana has plans of her own. What follows is a love story about everything that gets in the way of one, and what it costs to cross age, culture, politics, and a country still deciding what it is.
In development for television 461 pages
Start here
A printable set of ten prompts from The Doorframe Journals. Print it, sit down with it, and see how it feels to answer one. If it works, there is a whole book of them.
You will also hear when the next journal is ready. No more than one email a month, and you can leave whenever you like.
The Doorframe Journals
Each has 130 questions written in her own voice, room for up to three children by name, and permission on every page to skip anything she does not want to answer. They can be filled in in any order. Each one stands alone.
For single mothers
They were there for all of it. They remember almost none of it. The questions a mother answers so her children know how she did it, before the details are gone. 208 pages, in paperback and hardcover.
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For immigrant mothers
Her children have only ever met the second half of her. This one asks about the first: the life before, the leaving, the years here that nearly broke her. She can answer in any language, and there is a glossary at the back for the words she wants them to keep. 220 pages.
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For widowed mothers
They will forget his voice. She is the only copy. Not a grief journal: it asks her to tell them the story of their life, and he is in it. Seven pages for the things that disappear first, and a page to keep something in his handwriting. 216 pages.
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In progress
Historical romance · Kenya, 1963
Kenya, 1963. A girl the village calls bad blood, a Frenchman who does not know what he is, and a country weeks away from becoming itself.
In progressYoung adult fantasy · A series of five books
A thirteen-year-old girl with powers she cannot explain must break an ancient curse and free the souls trapped inside a crystal sphere.
Coming soonThe author
Born in Zanzibar and raised in Kenya, where she studied literature and began her working life as a singer. She moved to France in 1994 and to the United States in 2010, and now writes and paints in Los Angeles.
She is the author of Bewitched, in development as a television miniseries, and the founder of Doorframe Press. The immigrant edition of the journals is hers in every sense.
The imprint
Named for the one record almost every family keeps without meaning to: pencil marks on a doorframe, dated, climbing the wall.
Doorframe Press publishes books written by hand. Guided journals meant to be filled in, kept, and handed to someone later, and novels that take their time.
Rights and press enquiries: doorframepress@gmail.com