It’s one of the best things I’ve read this year, and it picks up on his love of film: It’s long, so I’ll split it into two chunks. I thought of Shteyngart while reading the following paragraph, from late in Mohamed’s novel, when Mahmood is in prison. I can’t find the passage in my copy, but he expressed the notion that we want a sign, all of us, that our journey is somehow a special one. There was a moment in Gary Shteyngart’s novel “Lake Success” (2018), the so-so book he wrote before this year’s excellent one, that’s stuck with me. Let’s talk first about what works, because that’s more fun. “The Fortune Men,” which was shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, is a potent, pointed novel that nonetheless remains distant - it never quite finds an emotional tone. His real crime, Mohamed’s account makes clear, is that he was an expendable Black man, a “covetous darkie” in society’s eyes, one who’d had the temerity to marry a white woman. He was interested in the redistribution of wealth, as a socialist might put it, but on a small, personal scale.

Mahmood was a petty thief with a gambling itch. He was hanged in Cardiff Prison.įorty-six years later - strange how often this happens with state executions - he was exonerated. Mahmood was a young Somali sailor in Cardiff, Wales, who was falsely accused of the violent murder of a shopkeeper named Lily Volpert. The Somali-British novelist Nadifa Mohamed’s third novel, “The Fortune Men,” is based on a true story, that of one of the last men in Britain to be sentenced to death.

The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed