When civil war came to Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, in January 1991, two-t
hirds of the city s population fled. Among them was eight-year-old Asad Abdullah
i. His mother murdered by a militia, his father somewhere in hiding, he was swep
t alone into the great wartime migration that scattered the Somali people throug
hout sub-Saharan Africa and the world.
This extraordinary book tells Asad s st
ory. Tossed from one catastrophe to another, Asad s journey covers countries and
continents, from the cosmopolitan streets of inner-city Nairobi to the Ethiopia
n hinterland; and the promises and pitfalls of Johannesburg, South Africa, whose
streets he believed would be lined with gold. Thus begins a shocking adventure
in a country richer and more violent than he could possibly have imagined, leadi
ng to the final coda of America. Throughout, "A Man of Good Hope "is a complex,
affecting, ultimately hopeful portrait of Asad s search for salvation, suffused
with dreams and desires and a need to leave something permanent on this earth.
