Let’s talk first about what works, because that’s more fun. “The Fortune Men,” which was shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, is a potent, pointed novel that nonetheless remains distant - it never quite finds an emotional tone. His real crime, Mohamed’s account makes clear, is that he was an expendable Black man, a “covetous darkie” in society’s eyes, one who’d had the temerity to marry a white woman. He was interested in the redistribution of wealth, as a socialist might put it, but on a small, personal scale. Mahmood was a petty thief with a gambling itch.
He was hanged in Cardiff Prison.įorty-six years later - strange how often this happens with state executions - he was exonerated. Mahmood was a young Somali sailor in Cardiff, Wales, who was falsely accused of the violent murder of a shopkeeper named Lily Volpert. The Somali-British novelist Nadifa Mohamed’s third novel, “The Fortune Men,” is based on a true story, that of one of the last men in Britain to be sentenced to death.
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