October 1, 2021
A Granta Best of Young British Novelists, Mohamed (Black Mamba Boy) draws on real-life events in this story of young Somali sailor Mahmood Matton, the last individual to be sentenced to death in Cardiff, Wales. In 1952, Mahmood was falsely accused of killing a shopkeeper in Tiger Bay but steadfastly believed that justice would prevail. He didn't count on how racism and a corrupt legal system would combine to defeat him.
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November 1, 2021
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Mohamed's (The Orchard of Lost Souls, 2014) heart-wrenching third novel is based on the true story of Somali sailor Mahmood Mattan, a married father of three who was arrested in 1952 for the brutal murder of shopkeeper Violet Volacki in Cardiff, Wales. Separated from his wife, Laura, and struggling with an addiction to gambling that causes his finances to fluctuate wildly, Mahmood makes for an easy collar for the police after Violet's niece Grace claims she saw a Somali man at the door just before her aunt was slain. Initially, Mahmood is certain that the bald fact of his innocence will surely exonerate him, but as he's formally charged with the crime and hears the circumstantial evidence and heresy against him during the trial, his confidence wavers. Mohamed portrays both Mahmood and Diana, Violet's widowed younger sister, who is struggling in the aftermath of the murder, as Mahmood's trial progresses and his fate increasingly appears to be sealed. This powerful, deeply affecting exploration of mid-twentieth-century racism and other forms of prejudice has stark relevance today.
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December 1, 2021
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.
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Starred review from January 10, 2022
Set in Cardiff, Wales, in 1952, this searing novel from Mohamed (The Orchard of Lost Souls) draws on a real-life miscarriage of justice—the hanging of Mahmood Mattan, a Somali man, for a murder he didn’t commit. Mahmood, a small-time thief who has been desperate enough to steal money from the mosque he attends, has learned, or thinks he has, how to survive as a Black man in a city where the cops once beat a drunk to death simply because of his race: “to walk with his shoulders high, his elbows pointed out, his feet sliding slowly over the ground, his chin buried deep in his collar and his hat low over his face, to give nothing away apart from his masculinity.” Unfortunately, when someone slits the throat of shopkeeper Violet Volacki, the police arrest Mahmood, setting the stage for his execution. Mohamed maintains a high level of tension as the tragedy slowly unfolds. An epilogue details how Mahmood was exonerated years later. This is a powerful portrayal of an innocent man trapped by a racist system that will resonate with readers familiar with such travesties of justice in the U.S. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi.