Out of the mouths of babes... Good Morning Comrades is set in Angola in the early 90s, among civil war and supposed post-colonialism spearheaded by the liberating comrades from Cuba and the Soviet Union, with roving gangs of bandits and political unrest. And all witnessed through the eyes of a 12-year-old boy who's never known anything else and is just as cheerfully proud of it all as you'd expect of a good citizen.

I'm always a bit worried when I stumble upon a novel written by a poet; there's always the risk of trying to write like a poet, weighing the novel down with language. But like a good poet, Ondjaki knows the value of language, how to tell a story simply, without the narrator realising just how many different layers there are to his story, how much of history echoes in his language.