The path from Europe to Africa has been much traveled in literature but rarely in such an evocative, nuanced, and even playful way as in N. S. Köenings' Theft. Here are five seductive tales that move with grace and subtlety between the continents, between moments of utter ignorance and complex harmony, maintaining all the while a hardy faith in the essential sameness of all human desire.

In "Pearls to Swine," a childless socialite invites her American goddaughter to spend the summer in her European mansion. In "Wondrous Strange," a British spirit medium is haunted by the ghost of an ancient African djinn. In "Setting Up Shop," a young woman from an Indian Ocean island dreams of traveling to the US, even as a local entrepreneur, promising to leave his other wives for her, courts her relentlessly. In the title story, a bus hijacking in an East African city brings about critical change in the lives of a local bus tout and a first-time tourist from Philadelphia.