These five stories, each set in a different country, reveal the true bleakness of Africa. Poverty, slavery, prostitution, Aids, murder, corruption and the pathetic face-offs between tribes and religions predominate. Child narrators highlight the innocence and ingenuity of the continent's youth, but it's a cheap shot: a nine-year-old describing her own rape or an eight-year-old encouraged by his alcoholic mother to sniff glue to keep hunger pangs at bay can't fail to tug heartstrings. There's an occasional but ultimately harmless undertone of Christian propaganda (Akpan is a Jesuit priest), but it's the direct speech - which in some cases mixes pidgin English with italicised French and local dialect (imagine Poirot on the Niger) - and images such as 'His lips are as full as a banana' that really let the collection down.



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