Black Mamba Boy, By Nadifa Mohamed

The Odyssean story of Jama, a ten-year-old Somali boy born in the slums of Yemen's port city, Aden in the 1930s, who journeys, on foot, across Eritrea, the Nubian Sahara and Sin'ai deserts (as a child soldier at times, enlisted by Mussolini's imperial forces in East Africa) is told by his daughter, the debut novelist, Nadifa Mohamed.

Thanks to her imaginative leaps and poetic leanings, she is able to scale the gulf between respectful memoir and an affecting piece of fiction, for which she received an Orange prize nomination.

This paperback comes with a charming interview between Mohamed junior and senior, in which the latter appears to have lost little of the hope, and love of life, that got him through his gruelling boyhood travails.