Early on in Transcendent Kingdom, the narrator’s brother, Nana, is racially abused from the sidelines during a football match. Furiously, he sets out to decimate his opponents: ‘For the rest of that half he was little more than a blur, moving not with the elegance my father associated with soccer, but with pure fury.’ For his younger sister, Gifty, this provides ‘the lesson I have never quite been able to shake: that I would always have something to prove and that nothing but blazing brilliance would be enough to prove it.’

The episode has the teachable quality of a parable: it moves from a cause to a direct consequence, before providing an unexpected moral that sticks in the reader’s head. It operates at an economical remove from observed reality (does anyone, playing football, look like ‘a blur’?) and it demonstrates perfectly