Algerian writer Mohammed Moulessehoul took his wife’s name as his pseudonym to avoid censorship by the Algerian army, in which he was a senior officer. If this provokes mild cognitive dissonance in his readers, it’s of a piece with the unexpectedly romantic way that Khadra, an experienced counter-terrorist, tackles his theme in this novel, translated by Howard Curtis. German doctor Kurt Krausmann accepts an invitation to sail to Comoros on his rich friend’s yacht in the hope of getting over his wife’s suicide. Calamity strikes when pirates board the craft and take the two men hostage. There have been enough incidents of Somali piracy in the news (not to mention books and films) for us to have formed an image of desperate men generally lacking in mercy. Khadra’s pirates start off true to type, but are soon revealed to be not only fluent in English but also to have a knowledge of European culture that beggars belief. In truth, the hostage drama simply provides the context for a long disquisition on Africa, which is treated as a single mythic entity with the kind of stereotyping we might have hoped was long gone.
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