Frozen out of most jobs because of his race, he waits for opportunities to work as a sailor, spending his scarce funds at bars or the greyhound track, intermittently connecting with his estranged wife, Laura, and their children. In the early going, the novel alternates between scenes of Violet's family and Mahmood (rightly nicknamed Moody) and his precarious existence. The miscarriage of justice, as Mohamed portrays it, is rooted in the racism and religious bigotry that hounded Black Muslim immigrants from British Somaliland (part of what’s now Somaliland). Mohamed’s third novel is based on the real-life case of Mahmood Mattan, who, in 1952, was executed for the murder of a Jewish shop owner in Cardiff, here called Violet Volacki. A Somali immigrant in 1950s Wales is wrongly accused of a coldblooded murder.
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