Known to all as Jimmy the Weed, Jimmy Donnelly was a key figure in Manchester's Quality Street Gang. This autobiography details his rise from humble beginnings to ownership of clubs and massage parlours, his friendships with figures from the worlds of crime, showbiz and sport, and his arrests on suspicion of serious crimes.

An account of the landmark suffragist trial before the U.S. Circuit Court for the Northern District of New York, that brought the cause of women's voting rights to the forefront of national attention. A group of women led by Susan B. Anthony attempted to vote during the presidential election of 1872, claiming they were entitled to the Fourteenth Amendment. The presiding officials, Jones, Hall and Marsh, decided by a majority to accept their ballots. The women were soon arrested for this act and indicted for "knowingly voting without having a lawful right to vote." The officials were also indicated. This volume reprints the text of the indictment and a transcript of the testimony with connecting commentary.

In January 1991, when civil war came to Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, two-thirds of the city's population fled.

Among them was eight-year-old Asad Abdullahi. His mother murdered by a militiaman, his father somewhere in hiding, he was swept into the great wartime migration that scattered the Somali people throughout sub-Saharan Africa and the world.

Serially betrayed by the people who promised to care for him, Asad lived his childhood at a sceptical remove from the adult world, his relation to others wary and tactical.

By the time he had reached the cusp of adulthood, Asad had honed an array of wily talents. At the age of seventeen, in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, he made good as a street hustler. He also courted the famously beautiful Foosiya and, to the astonishment of his peers, married her.

Buoyed by success in work and in love, Asad put $1 200 into his pocket and made his way down the length of the African continent to Johannesburg, South Africa. And so began a shocking 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.