Excerpt from Scale Boy by Patrice Nganang, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Pèse-personne! " the boy said. Scale!

It unstartled me first, and only when he repeated the word, stripping me of my diasporic dorveille, did I plunge into the maze of my childhood. It was as if my perfect Menaechmi, by disappearing into the melee, into the feast of bodies, of hips and buttocks, had reenchanted a world of dagin, pagnes, chechias, and ganduras and set in motion all those figures of yesteryear that had been dormant around.

"Pèse-personne! " I called. Scale boy! Scale boy!

But he was gone. The noisy market was swallowing my voice, or was it the flush of tears bursting in my eyes, the peppery heat that was squeezing my throat and burning my cheeks?

"Scale boy!" Gisèle also said, as did a passing woman.

"Babana!"* a voice yelled toward a man in bubu with an elevation of folded sanja wrappers on his head. "Call that boy!"

"Are you deaf?" the man asked, angrily. "That man is calling you!"

The kid reappeared in the throng, his face a composed smile when he saw me agitating my right hand in the middle of the animated group, and came back running. I looked at him. Clean shoes, hair well cut. Certainly a good kid. Holiday job here.

I tested the line I knew by heart, on my lips the old quizzical adult smile I had recaptured from the long-gone past: "Does that machine of yours even work?"

Excerpted from Scale Boy by Patrice Nganang. Copyright © 2026 by Patrice Nganang. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.