PAWA’S BOOK OF THE WEEK ( Week 9, Second Edition)
Patrice Nganang is an author, poet and academic from Cameroon who writes primarily in French.
In Cameroon, the plum season is a highly anticipated time of the year.
But for the narrator of WHEN THE PLUMS ARE RIPE, the season reminds him of the “time when our country had thrown its sons into the desert, just as in the evenings the sellers throw all their still-unsold plums into the embers.”
In this novel of radiant lyricism, Patrice Nganang recounts the story of Cameroon’s forced entry into World War II.
In the process, he enhances our own understanding of that globe-spanning conflict all the while writing with wit and panache.
WHEN THE PLUMS ARE RIPE is a brilliantly crafted, politically charged epic that challenges not only the legacies of colonialism but the intersections of language, authority, and history.
The book is available on Amazon.com
