IF JEROME K. JEROME were alive today, he would be proud. Over a century after he wrote it, “Three Men in a Boat”, his quintessentially English comic novel about accident-prone Victorian gentlemen paddling down the River Thames, is a bestseller in southern Sudan.

This may seem unlikely. Southern Sudan is the scene of Africa's longest-burning civil war. Its people have for decades lived in fear of death or enslavement at the hands of mounted militiamen. How could they relate to a comedy about chaps in red-and-orange blazers sculling to Hampton Court and getting lost in the hedge maze there?

“People find this book a bit hard to understand,” admits William Luk, a bookseller in Rumbek, the war-scarred capital of Bahr el-Ghazal province. But a book doesn't have to sell many copies to qualify as a bestseller in this part of the world. Mr Luk's shop, which he opened in May 2002, is believed to be southern Sudan's only bookshop, and its stock is limited. Apart from three rather tattered mathematics text books, it has Charles Dickens's “David Copperfield”, Mark Twain's “Huckleberry Finn” and 20 copies of “Three Men in a Boat”.

Since he opened his shop, Mr Luk has sold eight books, five of them “Three Men in a Boat”. “If I had a catalogue I would try to choose different books but for now we have to rely on the Ugandan distributors to send us what they think is appropriate,” he says.

Some of his customers are happy, though. A friend enjoyed the book so much that he named his goat “Montmorency” after the dog that accompanies its three heroes down the river. And the Rumbek Secondary, one of the few remaining secondary schools in the south, is considering making it a set text this year, in place of “A Tale of Two Cities”.