Days Come and Go (Hardcover)
Staff Reviews
A powerful cultural family saga set in Cameroon and France, this book had me re-reading parts after I finished it. Anna, an outcast in her birth village, ends up in a shotgun marriage with the once-idealist scion of a powerful political family. Anna's daughter Abi, living in France, tries to repair her relationships in the fallout of a vitriolic divorce, and the sudden presence of terrorism in her and her son Max's life. And Tina and Jenny, Max's closest friends (despite living in another country), Anna's semi-adopted children-of-interest, who fall into the thrall of Boko Haram. It's a book that plants itself in your heart and mind, and I cannot recommend it enough. -- Jennifer M., Book Buyer
— From Staff Picks
Chronicling the beauty and turmoil of a rapidly changing Cameroon, 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.