Flight into danger: Freight Dogs, by Giles Foden, reviewed

Flying has always attracted chancers and characters to Africa. Wilbur Smith’s father so loved aviation he named his son to honour the Wright Brothers. ‘I am forever grateful he didn’t go for Orville,’ the Zambian-born author once confided. Smith father and son may well have approved of Giles Foden’s romping novel, which has African bush pilots at its core, and a style not dissimilar to that of an airport thriller.

School-age dreamer Emmanuel ‘Manu’ Kwizera comes from the implausibly beautiful hill country of eastern Congo. Green though the land is, its recent history is anything but pleasant: a plunge pool of horrific violence, backwash from the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Foden skilfully uses the grim fate of the Kwizera family — too Tutsi to be Congolese, not Tutsi enough to be Rwandan — to set the scene, as hyena-like rebel groups pull the crumbling dictatorship of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu to pieces.

Exposition is not for the fainthearted when dealing with the Great Lakes region of central Africa.