My classmates at school in London were a diverse bunch. Their parents had settled in England, traveling from places like Jamaica, Italy, India, Portugal, Cyprus, and Ireland to find work in the decades following the Second World War. All of them had stories to tell of discrimination and prejudice, and occasionally direct experience of racial hatred and violence. They knew what it felt like to be in the underclass. They had all seen the signs in the windows saying “No Blacks, No Irish”. They had all been refused service in restaurants and pubs. Beneath these everyday expressions of racial hatred lay something very dangerous, the deep-rooted inequality in Britain’s institutions and systems, and in processes that could lead so easily to people losing their freedoms or, even worse, their lives for no other reason than their faces didn’t fit.

Nadifa Mohamed’s novel, set in Cardiff in 1952, is based on the real-life story of Mahmood Mattan, a Somali sailor convicted and executed for the murder of a local shopkeeper, a murder he didn’t commit. A combination of fabricated evidence, corrupt police officers, and false witness statements based on nothing more than hatred of immigrants was enough to seal Mattan’s fate and send him to the gallows, leaving behind a grieving family. It’s a horrific tale, the type of story that we hear too frequently but that never loses its power to appall. Such stories don’t necessarily make good novels, and The Fortune Men, though affecting in many ways, somehow ultimately lacks the powerful punch it ought to have had. There’s so much to admire in Mohamed’s novel, but ultimately the man at the heart of this story, the complicated man who journeyed from Somalia to Wales and the hangman’s noose, never comes fully to life, and never quite becomes something more than a name in a newspaper clipping from seventy years ago.