Written in a rage but appearing restrained due to its concision, this is a timeless novel. A very specific J’accuse yet the rhythms of the tragedy (inevitable as all good tragedies are) are universal. There is poetry on every page, there is the journalistic impulse on every page, there is a keen storyteller simply daring us to watch the student set out on the march. I can’t give enough praise to this.

There really isn’t anything that William Boyd cannot do. A stark thriller in the mode of The 39 Steps? No problem. Acute cultural criticism? No problem, anything else? A tour of the underworld? Portraits of the damned? Satire of the high-falutin and high finance? Yes, yes and yes. All of the above. He truly is a joy to read and his ambition is praiseworthy. He leaves the reader sated yet wanting a repeat engagement. Encore.

I am too close to the uneasy trauma of Hisham Mitar’s novel. The contours of my childhood intersect too fully with the quiet horror and psychic and physical wounds that his characters experience. And I was the lucky one, Ghana’s foray into horror was, truth be told, episodic. The special quality of life under Gaddafi was a pervasive, all-consuming horror if the state turned on you. The violence, the fear, the distrust, the mob… the violence again. It is too much. The perspective of the 9 year old child makes what takes place fraught and the spare writing captures the hallucinatory tinge. I couldn’t bear to read it, I couldn’t bear to put it down. Like one of the characters in the novel, I want to place a sheet over the mirror, I don’t want to see myself. Call me internally displaced, I’ve discovered the writings of an exiled soul.

A taut military procedural and tense thriller, the setting is the Biafra conflict as the futility of war and secession begins to be felt. The General in retreat orders his commanders to save the capital. The hero that manages this feat even briefly and at a bloody cost is instead rewarded with prison. The resort in response is to mercenaries who obviously have their own agenda. And the game is on. Civil war is never pretty and the players in this war are true to form. By focusing on the sense of adventure and the twists and turns on the ground, by clearly drawing out the motivations of the characters, we are treated to a great war novel. I await the b-movie.

Russians must be the most consistently bleak people in the world and they have a lot to show for their outlook. They have suffered all varieties of collapse: political, economic, cultural and so forth. The casual cruelties on display in this book of horrific fairy tales are unsettling, they concern a society in which predators reign supreme, where social cohesion is chimeric, where the every day compact is distorted. This is a portrait of a society in distress. True you can read this as the darkest type of humour and certainly the craft of the storytelling, the matter of fact language are worth celebrating but the effect of reading these tales is akin to ingesting an emetic. It may purge you of all illusions about mankind but what point is there to life with one’s eyes wide open if the everyday is a waking nightmare. I’d rather go with social living than its reverse.

Her eye doesn’t miss a thing and what she describes of the ravages of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is at once piercing and memorable. The journalistic impulse reigns and we are treated to a portrait of a country in distress and people making the best of things amongst inflation, corruption and worse. Humour, irony and cynicism are displayed in equal measure. Consider her brand of stellar storytelling as the future of African literature – if only real life were not so bleak.

Less lacerating perhaps than Kourouma’s take on child soldiers, militias and senseless civil war, this is still a stark story. The parallel and intertwined narrative strategy is ingenious in that one sees things from . The violence and sociopathy, the brutal rapes and the cynical trigger-happy people who perform them have their own logic. Dongala however must think that it is would be too much for the reader and so he serves up a contrasting perspective of life under assault from these hellish small boy units. It does soak up some of the shock. Too much of the unrelenting violence would lose the audience. The indictment of the international community, well, that is par for the course. The set pieces have indeed historical antecedants: helicopter interventions, rescuing only favoured nationals and leaving the locals to fend for themselves, collateral damage etc. A novel about outrage at the depths to which we can descend in Africa.

He was so right, so prescient and so outraged. And I was right there with him. Bush and co did a number on the US but there were many useful idiots and willing accomplices who turned a blind eye – their current buyer’s remorse is suspect and this collection proof positive of their selective amnesia. No one can say that they were duped – Rees told them so and very loudly. The historical record stands unchallenged.

A puzzler really, with an aura of menace and wist and tragedy about it. The issue is family – and country. Pavana decided at the very last minute to not go through with an abortion and 12 years later returns to Belize with her twins. At the back of her mind perhaps is the thought of informing their father of their existence. Of course, as per the title, there are complications. The narrative goes back and forth between the late sixties in London where she was a young student and her life with other immigrant and the onset of Belizean independence. She has chosen an auspicious time to return, a time when independence and nationalism are the order of the day and demonstrations and violence are in the air. And politics too, the kind of fractious politics that one would expect where sharp elbowed maneuvering runs against careerism and nepotism. A woman with a history, a strong woman yet struggling with lving conflicts in that environment will have a hard time of it but one should stand up and be counted. Call it a Greek tragedy by way of the Caribbean.

If Thomas Akare’s The Slums was a full-throttle blast of bleakneess, Meja Mwangi’s brand of narrative is more considered – perhaps empathy comes to him more easily. This is not to say that irony doesn’t suffuse the writing or that the zingers don’t shock you. This is a full frontal look at the slums of Nairobi and their denizens. You can smell the stench of their shacks, taste the bootleg liquor they drown themselves in and linger in the predatory atmosphere. Everyone uses everyone else, that’s the way of the jungle. Sex, work, leisure is all about money and power. A brilliant and relentless novel that even manages to find soul and brotherhood among the futility.