Africa tends to attract the attention of the developed world only for the bleakest reasons. Media coverage of the continent has for decades been overwhelmingly concerned with a now-familiar litany of horrors: brutal dictatorships, bloody insurrections and devastating famines.

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Justin Hill set out to write a different, more optimistic book about the small, east African state of Eritrea. Hill is a former aid worker whose previous publication, The Drink and Dream Teahouse, drew heavily on his experiences in China. In July 1996 he arrived in Eritrea to begin a teaching job. The country was, he thought, beginning to recover from the long and savage war that had been waged to gain independence from Ethiopia. His book was to be about a nation's journey towards normality.

Things didn't turn out that way. In 1998, Hill and most other western expatriates were airlifted out of the Eritrean capital, Asmara, as hostilities with Ethiopia resumed. Another truce was reached in 2000, but by then thousands more had died, and the hopes that blossomed in Eritrea's early days of independence had withered.

Ciao Asmara has much to recommend it. Hill is a strong writer. His prose is, for the most part, graceful and fluent. The author doesn't present himself as something he is not: he does not exaggerate his knowledge of the country and he also steers clear of the irritating faux-naif persona favoured by some travel writers.

He traces Eritrea's history competently, if not with any great verve or comprehensiveness. Powerful points are made about the country's status as a pawn in the Cold War chess game -- the US facilitated the annexation of Eritrea by Ethiopia in the early 1960s because Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie was an important regional ally. Hill also pulls no punches in his descriptions of Selassie's despotic communist successor, Mengistu Haile Miriam.

Ciao Asmara's strongest element comes from Hill's developing awareness of the country's problems. The more he learns about Eritrea, the more he sees his initial optimism as utterly unrealistic.

The armed struggle for independence lasted 32 years. The brutalisation that is inevitable in such a situation runs deep and cannot, Hill suggests, be easily undone. Its effects are clear, even in the school where he teaches.

"Once, one of the teachers in the English Department found two grade-six students who had kidnapped a grade-seven girl and were raping her in one of the old Ethiopian trenches. He trussed them up and dragged them back to the staffroom. The police were called. They brought their cattle prods with them," he writes.

"Violence had become such a part of the national psyche that some people weren't able to let go. I think many of the teachers and students in the school were addicted to it."

Violence, or the memory of it, lurks in the most apparently mundane situations. When Hill first meets and befriends a man called Tedros, he gently pokes fun at the Eritrean's bizarre admiration for Jeffrey Archer. Hill subsequently learns that his new friend had been brutally tortured during 15 years of imprisonment. Later still, Tedros asks him about the BBC World Service.

"It was the last time I saw Tedros," Hill relates. "He was with his grandmother when he did it. He poured kerosene over his head and set it alight. As he burnt, he ran out into the street screaming, and people found him there. He had also stabbed himself in the stomach just to make sure."

Hill does not seek to minimise these horrors. His book does, however, contain many less intense episodes, several of which are engaging. He vividly describes his visit to Massawa, scene of a crucial battle in the war of independence, and also reckoned to be the hottest place on earth. He also sits in the house of a 78-year-old woman, Mama Teka, watching the home videos that her exiled children send back to her. She plays one of them for Hill.

One serious failing undermines Ciao Asmara: the book adds up to less than the sum of its parts. Hill tells the story of Eritrea's history, but not with sufficient depth; he attempts a kind of reportage about the conflict with Ethiopia, but he depends on a small number of interviewees; the book is part travelogue, but the author's most whimsical observations strike an odd note in the midst of descriptions of death and horror. These different strands are never synthesised into one potent narrative.

Despite that, Ciao Asmara offers an excellent starting point for readers. It is a readable and often moving book.