The cover for Scale Boy: An African Childhood, the highly anticipated memoir by acclaimed Cameroonian novelist Patrice Nganang, has been revealed.

It offers readers a first glimpse into the chronicle of youth in modern Africa. The book is set to publish on January 20, 2026, from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Patrice Nganang’s Scale Boy is a vivid memoir that shifts from fiction to personal reflection. It captures the contradictions of growing up in Cameroon during a time of upheaval and change. He recalls a youth marked by joy and community, even as it unfolded amid uncertainty. Rather than relying on familiar tropes, Nganang offers a fresh vision of a young African man’s coming-of-age, one that embraces the full complexity of modern African life.

In Scale Boy, Nganang brings his attention to bear on a post-independence Cameroon, taking for his subject matter the events of his own life, his sense of place and his realization of his own personal history and the history of Cameroon: how the facts of the latter have ineradicably shaped the facts of the former, down to questions as essential as accent, taste.
The memoir begins with a moment of involuntary memory: Nganang, an adult, back in Cameroon, is confronted by a boy trying to sell him his service: the use of an American scale. The enduring practice of this distinct profession, that of the scale boy, who brings his weighing machine from house to house, exchanging its use for a small sum, draws Nganang back to the incidents his own childhood, his turn as a scale boy, his German scale purchased from a Greek merchant. Through short, punchy chapters interspersed with photographs, Nganang recalls his stint working at a garage, his childhood neighborhood and neighbors in the city of Yaoundé and the way  that both emblematize the ethnic make-up and history of Cameroon, through to his schoolboy days, his study of Cameroonian history and love of literature. The narrative builds up to and ends with the 1984 attempted coup against the then new and still-ruling president of Cameroon, Paul Biya, which introduces a violence and temporary instability that serve to usher in the end of Nganang’s childhood and to set the stage for the politically impasses of contemporary Cameroon.
Scale Boy is a memoir that brings great brightness and joy to the tumultuous years of discovering oneself and one’s history; though there are moments of danger and confusion in his story, Nganang presents a new vision of a young Black African man’s coming-of-age. As he writes in the book: “To me, Cameroon’s history was a novel, my first true novel.”

While Nganang has established himself as a masterful novelist, Scale Boy marks his first extended work of memoir. This form allows him to draw directly from his own experiences growing up in Cameroon. The book promises to bring the same vivid storytelling and historical consciousness that characterize his fiction to the intimate terrain of personal memory.

Patrice Nganang was born in Cameroon and is a novelist, poet, and essayist whose work has garnered international acclaim. His novel Dog Days received the Prix Marguerite Yourcenar and the Grand Prix littéraire d’Afrique noire, two of francophone literature’s most prestigious honors. He is the author of Mount Pleasant (FSG, 2016), When the Plums Are Ripe (FSG, 2019), and A Trail of Crab Tracks (FSG, 2022), which was named a 2022 New Yorker Book of the Year.

His work consistently explores Cameroonian history and the African experience with nuance, depth, and literary sophistication.

Pre-order Scale Boy: An African Childhood here!