If you put to one side its African locale for a moment, you could argue that the story of A Man of Good Hope reads a bit like a Dickens novel. A young boy, suddenly orphaned and left to fend for himself, sets off on a swashbuckling odyssey; he jumps boarders, hustles on street corners and falls in love, chancing upon kind relatives and wicked villains along the way. And, as in Dickens’ ‘social’ novels, through a perfect blend of comedy and tragedy we learn to view the cruel world in which our hero inhabits through the eyes of a realist. Life is hard for Assad Abdullahi, and it’s not about to get any easier.

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