Scale Boy

An African Childhood

by Patrice Nganang

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Pub Date Jan 20 2026 | Archive Date Feb 20 2026

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.

A Note From the Publisher

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.

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...

Advance Praise

“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. His account of colonial machinations and oppressions is appropriately stern and unsparing.” —Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature

“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. His account of colonial machinations and...