FORTUNE FAVOURS THE BRAVE

BOOKS

- Shougat Dasgupta

THE FORTUNE MEN

by Nadifa Mohamed

VIKING

Having yet to read the other novels on the Booker shortlist but going on instinct, this reviewer would like to place a small, theoretical wager on the prize being awarded to Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men. The book is a compelling, atmospheric and profoundly angering rendition of the true story of a Somali sailor hanged in Cardiff for a murder he did not commit. We are introduced to Mahmood Mattan, a petty thief nicknamed ‘the Ghost’, slinking into a bar in Cardiff’s docklands on the night George VI is pronounced dead. “Raise your glasses, ladies and gentlemen,” shouts the owner of the pub, a Somali transplant, “and send offour old King to Davy Jones’s Locker.” The docks are almost comically vibrant—purgatorial, transitory spaces seething with cosmopolitan and largely male energy. Here, everyone is thrown together in a sometimes combustible mix.