The highlight for me this year was the South African writer Jonny Steinberg’s A Man of Good Hope (Cape, £18.99), hugely topical at a time when Europe is contemplating what it means to be a refugee. I’ve repeatedly found myself recommending it to friends. Steinberg is a novelist camouflaging himself as a non-fiction writer, and his story of Somali tradesman Asad’s meandering journey across Africa — from the clan violence of Mogadishu via the slums of Nairobi and Addis Ababa to the townships of Cape Town and their vindictive, xenophobic attacks — is extraordinarily poignant. A real-life picaresque tale, it doesn’t contain a single dull sentence.
Shame (Weidenfeld, £14.99), a second novel by Melanie Finn, deserved more recognition than it received. The story of a young woman who exiles herself to a remote village in Tanzania after an accidental killing in Switzerland, only to be tracked down by a former neighbour bent on revenge, it’s both disturbing and ultimately uplifting.
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