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Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize - A Reader's Review
Set in 1952 and based on a true story, this features a fabulous cast of vivid characters, painted against a background so atmospheric that it made me want to go walk those very streets around the Cardiff docks. A poignant tale, told with wit and compassion, of race and multiculturalism, love and loss. Highly recommend. - Tanya Carus
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About The Fortune Men
Mahmood Mattan is a fixture in Cardiff's Tiger Bay, 1952, which bustles with Somali and West Indian sailors, Maltese businessmen and Jewish families. He is a father, chancer, some-time petty thief. He is many things, in fact, but he is not a murderer.
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Nadifa Mohamed Press Reviews
A writer of great humanity and intelligence. Nadifa Mohamed deeply understands how lives are shaped both by the grand sweep of history and the intimate encounters of human beings -- Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire
Chilling and utterly compelling, The Fortune Men shines an essential light on a much-neglected period of our national life -- Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireland
The Fortune Men describes how innocence is forced to justify itself before gross injustice. A novel of tremendous power, compassion and subtlety, it feels unsettlingly timely -- Pankaj Mishra
In her determined, nuanced and compassionate exposure of injustice, Mohamed gives the terrible story of Mattan's life and death meaning and dignity - Guardian
The Fortune Men confirms Mohamed as a literary star of her generation. When Mohamed's prose - simple and full of soul - illuminated him, Mahmood emerges as a beacon of humour, hope and endurance - Observer
Based on real events, Mohamed's novel is panoramic in its scope and rich in period atmosphere, vividly tracing the desperate livers of the victim and the accused - Mail on Sunday
The Fortune Men is a novel on fire, a restitution of justice in prose - FT
The Fortune Men is that rare novel that breaks your heart and, in so doing, gives you life. Nadifa Mohamed is a revelation - she writes with the fierce compassionate lightning of a truth-teller, lays bare the ghastly colonial condition that afflicts so many of us, where truth cannot overcome injustice. If a novel can be an avenger then The Fortune Men is the one we've all been waiting for -- Junot Diaz
Mohamed is . . . intent on expanding her world, listing its teeming varieties and presenting a wealth of character and language - TLS
Evocative and enlightening - New Statesman
A moving work - The Week, Novel of the Week
A moving and captivating tale of survival and hope in a war-torn country, and confirms Mohamed's stature as one of Britain's best young novelists - Stylist on The Orchard of Lost Souls
It's unbearably wrenching . . . Mohamed makes the outrage at the book's heart blazingly unignorable by inhabiting Mattan's point of view, a bold endeavour pulled off to powerful effect. Passages from the barbaric climax are still echoing in my head, even as I type - Daily Mail
Mixing startling lyricism and sheer brutality, this is a significant, affecting book - Guardian, on Black Mamba Boy
Just as Half of a Yellow Sun drew out the little documented dramas of the Biafran war, Mohamed describes an East Africa under Mussolini's rule . . . such an accomplished first novel - Independent, on Black Mamba Boy
A first novel of elegance and beauty... a stunning debut - The Times, on Black Mamba Boy
A haunting and intimate portrait of the lives of women in war-torn Somalia - New York Journal of Books, on The Orchard of Lost Souls
With the unadorned language of a wise, clear-eyed observer, Nadifa Mohamed has spun an unforgettable tale - Taiye Selasi, on The Orchard of Lost Souls
