Scale Boy: An African Childhood -- Patrice Nganang, Hardcover

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.

Author: Patrice Nganang
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 01/20/2026
Pages: 464
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9780374614515

About the Author
Patrice Nganang was born in Cameroon and is a novelist, poet, and essayist. His novel Dog Days received the Prix Marguerite Yourcenar and the Grand Prix littéraire de 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.