"Africa's most important literary award."-International Herald Tribune

Entertaining Deserves to be widely read."

Dazzling and splendidly diverse

It provokes and challenges.

The creators of Africa's best-known literary prize collect another stunning assortment of stories from around the continent. The stories include domestic dramas, heart-wrenching family narratives, and the absurd realms of the mathematicians behind the formulas for just about everything on earth- including grief. These stories highlight some of Africa's best emerging writers. Some, like NoViolet Bulawayo (We Need New Names), have already found global success; others, such as Lesley Nneka Arimah, have yet to publish a full-length book. As with most anthologies, some of the pieces don't strike as loud a chord, but, for the most part, the breadth of writing and storytelling styles is refreshing and consistently engaging. Standouts include Okwiri Oduor's precisely written 'The Daily Assortment of Astonishing Things,' which won the prize, and Arimah's 'What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky.' For those interested in world literature, this is a great way to get a foothold in the expanse of excellent African writing, and fans of literature in general will find this a choice collection of well-crafted and consistently surprising stories.

New voices are gathered in a collection that might be thought of as the African rejoinder to the annual Pushcart series.Taxes may be a wobbly proposition in emergent regimes, but death is certain everywhere. In one of the hallmark pieces in this collection, South African writer Bongani Kona addresses a family member now on the dais at a funeral requiem: 'Where does it begin,' he writes, 'the story of how you came to lie here in your dark blue suit?' In a few pages, Kona distills the love and damage shared by cousins, the desperation of some trying to will the suicidal dead back to life or, at the very least, to conjure a few untroubled memories. Just so, Zambian writer Namwali Serpell creates a world inhabited by two people thrown into accidental contact in what appears to be at one moment a workaday errand, at another an unfolding scam; as the story widens and the characters deepen, it acquires a lovely gravity ('a window boomed with an airy sound- a questioning sound, like the sceptical hmmm?s of gossiping women'). This gathering of stories represents the five-entry shortlist of the Caine Prize, an annual award to the African writer of the best short story in English, as well as a dozen stories from the prize workshop. The title story is set in Kenya, and it is a work of compressed wonder in the hands of its author, Okwiri Oduor, who imagines a young boy so enthralled by a radio trivia program that he swallows its nonsense whole: 'One day, Dudu cut off his eyelashes with paper scissors. He had heardthat a person could not walk in a straight line if all their lashes were gone.' Driven to distraction, his mother disappears, taking his transistor radio with her a crisis around which a telling psychological moment builds. The least successful stories in the collection take slices of life that are too thin, but all show promise, and all are very much worth reading."