The Week in Books: Africa's stories span comedy and tragedy – and every stage in between

Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter for all the latest entertainment news and reviews Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy History, wrote Edward Gibbon as he wearily surveyed the decline and fall of the Roman empire, "is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind". Ben Okri, the prize's vice-president and himself a short-story writer of distinction with the collections Incidents at the Shrine and Stars of the New Curfew, made an impassioned defence of the compact form not as a prelude or test-track for the full-length novel but "the exalted form", the "essence" of fiction, and "the seed that populates the forest" of all storytelling. In a deadpan, ironic voice, "Bombay's Republic" tells a sly historical fable about a Nigerian soldier who serves in Burma with the British army during the Second World War. Yet the finest novelist of Congolese origin I know is a comedian: the droll, mischievous and exuberant Alain Mabanckou, author of Broken Glass and African Psycho, who will be in this country next week as writer in residence at the "Room for London" boat on the South Bank.