An African Odyssey in New York City

Little Liberia

A powerful and revelatory account of the Liberian civil war and its human cost, following the lives of two men, from Monrovia to the east coast of America, and back.

Jonny Steinberg has come to define South African narrative non-fiction; now, in Little Liberia, he applies his prodigious talents globally. He is at the height of his powers, singular in his ability to tell a big story through vivid detail and unforgettable characters. He has one of the sharpest intellects of his generation; here he proves, once more, that he is also a masterful storyteller.

Extraordinary, stylistically varied mix of reportage, history and biography, which is revealing about the author as well as about his subjects, and about the vagaries of memory and motive... Maps, photographs, notes, a list of further reading, as well as a thorough index, all provide useful support for his skilled and compassionate chronicle

Steinberg has produced a juicy cocktail of reportage, biography and history that's compelling, shocking and totally engaging. It's storytelling at its expansive best... What appears on the surface to be a history of Liberia turns out to be a compelling story of memory, exile and loss: themes we can all relate to

Extraordinary, stylistically varied mix of reportage, history and biography... A skilled, compassionate chronicle

Brave, strong blend of history, biography and reportage

Jonny Steinberg was born and bred in South Africa. He is the author of critically acclaimed Three Letter Plague, published by Vintage, and Midlands and The Number, which both won South Africa's premier non-fiction literary award, the Sunday Times Alan Paton Prize. Steinberg was educated at Wits University in Johannesburg, and at Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He has worked as a journalist on a national daily, written scripts for television drama, and has been a consultant to the South African government on criminal justice policy.

On Park Hill Avenue in New York City, almost everyone is Liberian. Many fled here, survivors of a brutal civil war that claimed the lives of one in fourteen Liberians. But even an ocean away, the baggage of the past is difficult to leave behind. Steinberg spent two years in this close-knit neighbourhood, tracing the tensions between two men, Rufus and Jacob, with very different pasts but goals which were locked into a collision course. As national dramas played out on a small stage thousands of miles from home, Steinberg takes up a remarkable story of a horrific and heart-wrenching war, and of the quest to be human in a world losing its humanity.

A Young Man’s Journey Through a Great Epidemic

Three Letter Plague

'Not since My Own Country has the AIDS epidemic been described so deeply and so humanely... Steinberg is keenly attuned to the way a community encounters illness and has ended up with a big, brave, poignant look into the heart of his country' - Time Out

This forceful narrative, with sharp insights and value...has to do with the immense power of stigma, the ways in which we mirror the real or imagined condemnation of others, and of how easily stigma becomes entwined with sexuality

Writing with tenderness and authority, Steinberg skilfully manoeuvres past the prejudice that so often muddles analysis of HIV/AIDS to capture the essence of the pandemic and how it threatens not just lives in South Africa but the future of an entire nation

With his distinctive clarity of vision, Jonny Steinberg mines down into another of contemporary South Africa's fault lines and manages to pull off a remarkable literary feat - how to make AIDS engaging to a largely fatigued world

A compelling account... jaw-dropping and unforgettable

Sex and death are hard to talk about, but Jonny Steinberg has a gift for coaxing people to open up. If you want to know why AIDS is devastating southern Africa, you have to read this book. It is a brilliant exploration of the secret, intimate decisions that turn an epidemic into a catastrophe

A powerful, poignant and personal story that gets under the skin of a terrifying epidemic. Steinberg's sharp prose breaks down established boundaries between the personal and the medical, the scientific and the superstitious. The story has a relevance that transcends its immediate subject to challenge and explore our relationship with our own health. I will never look at medicine in the same way again

Jonny Steinberg was born and bred in South Africa. He is the author of critically acclaimed Three Letter Plague, published by Vintage, Little Liberia, Midlands and The Number, which both won South Africa's premier non-fiction literary award and the Sunday Times Alan Paton Prize. Steinberg was educated at Wits University in Johannesburg, and at Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He has worked as a journalist on a national daily, written scripts for television drama, and has been a consultant to the South African government on criminal justice policy.

At the end of a steep gravel road in one of the remotest corners of South Africa's Eastern Cape lies the village of Ithanga. Home to a few hundred villagers, the majority of them unemployed, it is inconceivably poor. It is to here that award-winning author Jonny Steinberg travels to explore the lives of a community caught up in a battle to survive the ravages of the greatest plague of our times, the African AIDS epidemic. 
 
He befriends Sizwe, a young local man who refuses to be tested for AIDS despite the existence of a well-run testing and anti-retroviral programme. It is Sizwe's deep ambivalence, rooted in his deep sense of the cultural divide, that becomes the key to understanding the dynamics that thread their way through a terrified community. 
 
As Steinberg grapples to get closer to finding answers that remain just out of reach, he realizes that he must look within himself to unlock the paradoxes at the heart of his country.

Jonny Steinberg

[A] testament to the human spirit... An epic African saga that chronicles some fundamental modern issues such as crime, human trafficking, migration, poverty and xenophobia, while giving glimpses into the Somali clan system, repression in Ethiopia and lethal racism in townships... [Steinberg] has delivered a strong insight into the lives of those buffeted by conflict and violence in this tale of a refugee driven by ambition, pride and dreams. Ultimately, it is a powerful testament to the resilience of humanity

[A Man of Good Hope] tells one man’s extraordinary and moving story, revealing the reality of life at the bottom of the world’s worst pile.

A masterpiece. Steinberg has illuminated a modern African odyssey to brilliant effect.

Martin Meredith, author of The State of Africa

What a brave, important book. Steinberg’s writing is so human, so humane and so honest. Through the remarkable tale of the truly astonishing character of Asad Abdullahi, Steinberg returns all of us from the despair of distance to the dignity of brotherhood. Steinberg stands shoulder to shoulder with other great writers who have also made sensible and visible so much that might otherwise remain insensible and invisible out of the political and human tragedies all too common in Africa - Michela Wrong, Ryszard Kapuscinski and Ishmael Beah. Steinberg’s central question is one for all of us: what does it means to live a "fully human life" and whom among us has either the courage or the luck to live that life?

An engrossing book... The humanity, suffering and bravery of Mr Abdullahi are palpable and make A Man of Good Hope a book well worth reading.

You come away from it full of admiration for the subject’s resilience and the writer’s forensic compassion, but not without a certain despair too.

A real-life picaresque tale, it doesn't contain a single dull sentence... hugely topical at a time when Europe is contemplating what it means to be a refugee… extraordinarily poignant.

An extraordinary account of resilience that ends on a hopeful note.

One Man's Extraordinary Journey from Mogadishu to Tin Can Town

When Asad was eight years old, his mother was shot in front of him. With his father in hiding, he was swept alone into the great wartime migration that has scattered the Somali people throughout the world. 
 
This extraordinary book tells Asad’s story. Serially betrayed by the people who promised to care for him, Asad lived his childhood at a sceptical remove from the adult world, living in a bewildering number of places, from the cosmopolitan streets of inner-city Nairobi to towns deep in the Ethiopian desert. 
 
By the time he reached the cusp of adulthood, Asad had made good as a street hustler, brokering relationships between hardnosed Ethiopian businessmen and bewildered Somali refugees. He also courted the famously beautiful Foosiya, and married her, to the astonishment of his peers. 
 
Buoyed by success in work and in love, Asad put $1,200 in his pocket and made his way down the length of the African continent to Johannesburg, whose streets he believed to be lined with gold. So began an adventure in a country richer and more violent than he could possibly have imagined. A Man of Good Hope is the story of a person shorn of the things we have come to believe make us human – personal possessions, parents, siblings. And yet Asad’s is an intensely human life, one suffused with dreams and desires and a need to leave something of permanence on this earth.

Jonny Steinberg

Praise for A Man of Good Hope

[A] testament to the human spirit... An epic African saga that chronicles some fundamental modern issues such as crime, human trafficking, migration, poverty and xenophobia, while giving glimpses into the Somali cla ...

[A Man of Good Hope] tells one man’s extraordinary and moving story, revealing the reality of life at the bottom of the world’s worst pile.

A masterpiece. Steinberg has illuminated a modern African odyssey to brilliant effect.

[A] testament to the human spirit... An epic African saga that chronicles some fundamental modern issues such as crime, human trafficking, migration, poverty and xenophobia, while giving glimpses into the Somali cla ...

[A Man of Good Hope] tells one man’s extraordinary and moving story, revealing the reality of life at the bottom of the world’s worst pile.

A masterpiece. Steinberg has illuminated a modern African odyssey to brilliant effect.

[A] testament to the human spirit... An epic African saga that chronicles some fundamental modern issues such as crime, human trafficking, migration, poverty and xenophobia, while giving glimpses into the Somali cla ...

[A Man of Good Hope] tells one man’s extraordinary and moving story, revealing the reality of life at the bottom of the world’s worst pile.

A masterpiece. Steinberg has illuminated a modern African odyssey to brilliant effect.

Books by Jonny Steinberg

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