The Granta Book of the African Short Story, Edited by Helon Habila

How to gather together the stories of a continent that is bigger than China, Europe and the US put together? How to anthologise 53 countries, a billion people and over a thousand ethnic groups?

This is the self-acknowledged problem facing editor Helon Habila, who decided to order the volume's 29 entries generationally.

But young or old the over-riding preoccupation of these writers is exile - from Moroccan Laila Lalami's "Homecoming", to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "Arrangers of Marriage", a witty story about a Nigerian woman's life in New York.