An intimate personal portrait with a broader message on the mistreatment of migrants.
A Somali immigrant in 1950s Wales is wrongly accused of a coldblooded murder.
Mohamed’s third novel is based on the real-life case of Mahmood Mattan, who, in 1952, was executed for the murder of a Jewish shop owner in Cardiff, here called Violet Volacki. The miscarriage of justice, as Mohamed portrays it, is rooted in the racism and religious bigotry that hounded Black Muslim immigrants from British Somaliland (part of what’s now Somaliland). In the early going, the novel alternates between scenes of Violet's family and Mahmood (rightly nicknamed Moody) and his precarious existence. Frozen out of most jobs because of his race, he waits for opportunities to work as a sailor, spending his scarce funds at bars or the greyhound track, intermittently connecting with his estranged wife, Laura, and their children. Mahmood is questioned after the murder but dismisses its seriousness as just another example of British prejudice: “No end to the lies they tell to make a black man’s life hard.” But as suspicion leads to an arrest and then a court trial, his understandable defiance becomes a liability in a British legal system eager to convict. Mohamed’s depiction of Violet and her family is less full than her picture of Mahmood, and the alternating structure feels somewhat like an unfinished attempt to parallel the two as religious outcasts. But Mahmood is admirably full in himself: angry (sometimes violently so) but committed to his faith and sense of fairness in spite of his recognition that his Blackness was something “he was mad to think he could ever outrun.” Mahmood’s fate is never much in doubt (an epilogue brings the story up to date) but it’s an engrossing and tense story all the same. From Mahmood’s interior monologue to court transcripts to his conversations with Laura, the senses of loss and cruelty are palpable.
An intimate personal portrait with a broader message on the mistreatment of migrants.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-059-3534-366
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.
A love triangle among young literati has a long and complicated aftermath.
King’s narrator doesn’t reveal her name until the very last page, but Sam and Yash, the brainy stars of her 17th-century literature class, call her Jordan. Actually, at first they refer to her as Daisy, for Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, but when they learn she came to their unnamed college on a golf scholarship, they change it to Jordan for Gatsby’s golfer friend. The boys are housesitting for a professor who’s spending a year at Oxford, living in a cozy, book-filled Victorian Jordan visits for the first time after watching The Deer Hunter at the student union on her first date with Sam. As their relationship proceeds, Jordan is practically living at the house herself, trying hard not to notice that she’s actually in love with Yash. A Baptist, Sam has an everything-but policy about sex that only increases the tension. The title of the book refers to a nickname for the king of hearts from an obscure card game the three of them play called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, and both the game and variations on the moniker recur as the novel spins through and past Jordan’s senior year, then decades into the future. King is a genius at writing love stories—including Euphoria (2014), which won the Kirkus Prize—and her mostly sunny version of the campus novel is an enjoyable alternative to the current vogue for dark academia. Tragedies are on the way, though, as we know they must be, since nothing gold can stay and these darn fictional characters seem to make the same kinds of stupid mistakes that real people do. Tenderhearted readers will soak the pages of the last chapter with tears.
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780802165176
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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