Scale Boy: An African Childhood

Description:

An extraordinary chronicle of youth that evokes the paradoxes of modern Africa--complex, contradictory, and full of conflict, tragedy, and joy.

Patrice Nganang, the acclaimed author of Dog Days, Mount Pleasant, and, most recently, A Trail of Crab Tracks, which was a 2022 New Yorker Book of the Year, writes about his vibrant, animated youth in Cameroon, a period of upheaval and change in the country's history and in his life.

Scale Boy is a memoir that brings great brightness and joy to the tumultuous years of discovering oneself and one's community; though there are moments of danger and confusion in his story, Nganang aims to present a new vision of a young Black African man's coming-of-age.

Brief description: Patrice Nganang was born in Cameroon and is a novelist, a poet, and an essayist. His novel Dog Days received the Prix Marguerite Yourcenar and the Grand Prix littéraire d'Afrique noire. He is also the author of Mount Pleasant (FSG, 2016), When the Plums Are Ripe (FSG, 2019), and A Trail of Crab Tracks (FSG, 2022). He teaches comparative literature at Stony Brook University in New York.

Review Quotes:

"In this unhurried, lyrical memoir, a novelist remembers his youth in Cameroon in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. Anchored by Nganang's years as a 'scale boy'--weighing people and products for a small fee--the narrative wends through anecdotes that depict a young man discovering his artistic and intellectual powers along with his nation's colonial history."
--The New Yorker

"Scale Boy is much more than a portrait of an African childhood. It portrays the cultural and linguistic complexity of the nation with wit and humor. Nganang's account of colonial machinations and oppressions is appropriately stern and unsparing."
--Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

"An elegant, closely observed memoir of challenges overcome on the path to becoming a writer."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"[A] gorgeous memoir . . . This elegant portrayal of finding grace and beauty amid upheaval will captivate readers."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)