Some books are so unlike any others that it takes a while to understand what is happening when you start reading them. Their characters are unfamiliar and the situations unrecognisable, and even bizarre. That was the case when I started reading The Sellout by Paul Beatty. The Sellout was entirely different to any other book I had read. Narrated by the son of a single father, a sociologist psychopathically obsessed with racism, who was killed in a drive-by shooting.  He comes up with ways of