Sometimes Mohamed’s thoroughness betrays her. The purposeful detail is an implicit corrective to all the times when the lives of people like Mattan have not been considered at all. At the same time, it revels in the everyday rituals of Butetown: Jewish festivals, Hindi spices, Muslim prayers, The Ink Spots on the gramophone. Its view is panoramic, roving deep into Mattan’s childhood in British Somaliland and taking care also to memorialise Volpert, here reimagined as Violet Volacki, who lives in fear of a brick smashing through her window, anti-Semitism being almost as rife in 1950s Britain as hatred of the black man. Like Mohamed’s two previous novels, set in Yemen and Somalia respectively, The Fortune Men excavates the forgotten reaches of British colonial history. In Mohamed’s tender, unsentimental reimagining, he is characterised more by circumstance than by fixed characteristics, and it is a problem of the novel that you are never entirely sure whether his unstable, elusive quality is an intentional narrative effect. He’s a ducker and a diver, a gambler and a womaniser, a devoted father and petty criminal, a joker and a dreamer.

But it is Mattan who is the novel’s chaotic animating force, a former stoker who has travelled the world by ship and has three little boys by his estranged Welsh wife, Laura. It takes place at a seismic moment in British history, as the empire that turned so much of the map pink is starting its slow but inexorable retreat. His conviction, procured on the flimsiest of evidence, was overturned in 1998 after it emerged the police had pressurised a witness.įrom these bare facts, Mohamed has fashioned a novel heaving with life. At his trial, even his defence counsel called this speaker of five languages a “semi-civilised savage”.

Later that year, he was wrongfully convicted and executed for the murder of Lily Volpert, a Jewish shopkeeper found with her throat cut. Yet Mattan, a real historical figure, would soon come face to face with the British establishment. He’s there with other Somalians and a ragtag of men blown in from the four corners of the British Empire, who have made a hardscrabble home among the “low slung, wind blown terraces” of the Butetown housing estate, and to their ears the radio announcer with his “white bow-tie” voice might as well live on a different planet. We first meet the Somalian sailor Mahmood Mattan, in Nadifa Mohamed’s Booker-shortlisted novel, in a bar in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay on the day of the death of King George VI in 1952.

The fortune men reviews