'Seen/Unseen' is the work of a team of famous international photographers from Panos Pictures and shows real rural life in Africa rather than the horrific images of the continent we usually see in our newspapers and on the TV news each day.
The VSO exhibition coincided with a six-part ITV series, called 'VSO Making a Difference', and the publication of a research report about the developing world seen through British eyes, entitled 'The Live Aid Legacy'.
The charity is still desperate for experts on HIV to volunteer to work in Africa and Latin America and TV personality Jonathan Dimbleby stressed that the Aids pandemic, poverty and wars made VSO's work all the more essential. Martin Flynn

VSO, 317 Putney Bridge Road, London SW15 2PN. Tel: 020 8780 7200. Website: www.vso.org.uk

photos: panos pictures

The Picador Book of African Stories edited by Stephen Gray.
Published in paperback just before Christmas, this includes forty stories from post-1980 writers across the African continent, most haven't been collected before and

many are freshly translated into English from Arabic, French and Portuguese. A mixture of famous names and new contenders.