Days Come and Go: Hemley Boum with Kesha Ajose-Fisher
7:00 pm PDT
Powell’s City of Books | 1005 W. Burnside St. | Portland, OR 97209
For readers of Yaa Gyasi and Imbolo Mbue, an English-language debut of a major African writer that dazzles as it devastates, offering an intimate look at three generations of a Cameroonian village as its people attempt to make sense of an inherited past and the complexities of belonging.
Chronicling the beauty and turmoil of a rapidly changing Cameroon, Hemley Boum’s Days Come and Go is the remarkable story of three generations of women both within and beyond its borders. Through the voices of Anna, a matriarch living out her final days in Paris; Abi, Anna’s thoroughly European daughter (at least in her mother’s eyes); and Tina, a teenager who comes under the sway of a militant terrorist faction, Boum’s epic is generous and all-seeing. Brilliantly considering the many issues that dominate her characters’ lives — love and politics, tradition and modernity — Days Come and Go, in Nchanji Njamnsi’s vivid translation, is a page-turner by way of Frantz Fanon and V. S. Naipaul. As passions rise, fall, and rise again, Boum’s stirring English-language debut offers a discerning portrait of a nation that never once diminishes the power of everyday human connection.
Boum will be joined in conversation by Kesha Ajose-Fisher, author of No God Like the Mother.
Pre-order a signed copy of Days Come and Go(opens in a new tab) from Powell’s today!
Hemley Boum is the author of four novels, including Les Maquisards, which received the Grand prix littéraire de l’Afrique Noire, and Days Come and Go (Les jours viennent et passent), winner of the Prix Amadou Kourouma, which has been translated into both German and Dutch. Hemley was born in Cameroon, where she studied anthropology before relocating to Lille, France, to study international trade. She currently lives in Paris, France.
Kesha Ajose-Fisher was born in Chicago and raised in Lagos, Nigeria. Her debut collection of fictional stories, No God Like the Mother, recently won the Ken Kesey Award For Fiction in the 2020 Oregon Book Awards. Fisher has won the 2020 Oregon Book Award for Fiction and The Phoenix Literary Magazine’s Editor’s Choice Award for Short Fiction in both 2011 and 2012. Her writing has been published in several online and print collections, and in such publications as Multicultural Familia Magazine, the Alchemy Literary Magazine, and twice in Beyond Black & White Magazine.