Set up an English-language short-story competition for African writers "whose work has reflected African sensibilities", name it after the late British food magnate and founder of the Booker prize, Sir Michael Caine, and you're bound to field a few charges of colonialism. Yet these works, five shortlisted for the prize and a further 12 drawn from the Caine prize's attendant writing workshop, cannot be neatly surmised or blithely stereotyped. There's the elegant decline of South African socialites in David Medalie's "The Mistress's Dog"; a blistering portrait of Zimbabwean street kids in NoViolet Bulawayo's "Hitting Budapest"; as well as the comic rendering of a Botswanan lothario in Lauri Kubuitsile's "In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata". Characters are called Polite, Darling and Bastard, hawkers sell "chess boards, motivational books, mineral water, rat poison, windscreen wipers, cellphones, carpets, toilet seats [and] 'non-alcoholic' wine". This is a vital collection of stories drawing on a rich treasury of material that couldn't have come from anywhere else.