What is ”the edge of South Africa”? Are we talking about an outer edge, like our jagged coastline, or the serrated blade of our borders to the north? The pieces in this remarkable book — At Risk: Writing On and Over the Edge of South Africa (Jonathan Ball), edited by Liz McGregor and Sarah Nuttall — suggest that the edge of South Africa goes right through its heart.

In his new life Mac Faraday is a blacksmith set up on his late father’s spread not too far from Melbourne. In his old life, he was a senior detective in the Australian federal police, but he left after a stakeout went sour and he’s trying to forget the whole thing. Then his friend on the next farm is found hanging in a machine shed.

Yasmina Khadra has written a heart-stinging and challenging successor to previous novels The Swallows of Kabul and The Attack. Set mainly in Iraq, it goes straight to the crucial issues and moral debates of our times, which most of us manage to ignore. It begins with violence against the innocent in Iraq and ends with similar violence planned against the perpetrators where, once again, the innocent will be most affected.