Scale Boy: An African Childhood by Patrice Nganang
Patrice Nganang has spent much of his career writing about Cameroon in novels such as Dog Days, Mount Pleasant (2016), When the Plums Are Ripe (2019) and A Trail of Crab Tracks (2022). In Scale Boy, he turns that same alert, expansive eye back on his own childhood.
As a boy in Yaoundé, Nganang carried a weighing scale through the city and charged to use it. That allowed him to move through streets, markets and homes, watching the people and systems that shaped the world around him. From there, the memoir opens into a larger portrait of childhood, labour, language and political life in Cameroon in the 1970s and 1980s.
The city matters as much as the family. So do the pressures of history, from the colonial past to the political climate of the time. That wider reach is what gives the memoir its weight. Nganang uses his own life and memories from childhood to build a much larger world.
A life after liberation
Chasing Freedom: Coming of Age at the End of Empire by Simukai Chigudu
Simukai Chigudu is best known for The Political Life of an Epidemic: Cholera, Crisis and Citizenship in Zimbabwe (2020), a serious work of political history and public health. In Chasing Freedom, he turns to memoir, but he brings the same intellectual discipline with him in a work that is determined to ask what freedom means in the long aftermath of empire.
His memoir starts with family history in Zimbabwe and tracks his journey to England, where Oxford becomes a key part of his story. Keeping private life and public history closely linked is one of his key strengths as a writer. Chigudu is not simply telling the story of a talented young man making his way through elite institutions. He is asking what those institutions continue to symbolise, and what happens when the promises of independence meet the realities of class, race, migration and power.
His involvement in Rhodes Must Fall, the student-led movement that began in March 2015 at the University of Cape Town and later extended to Oxford, gives the book an obvious contemporary edge. What makes the book interesting is not only its politics, but the tension running through it. Chigudu writes about ambition but also disappointment. He inherits the language of freedom, but also the strain and disillusionment that came after independence. The memoir keeps asking what freedom really means in practice, as opposed to a revolutionary ideal.
A mother who failed him
Homeschooled by Stefan Merrill Block
Stefan Merrill Block made his name as a novelist with The Story of Forgetting (2008), Oliver Loving (2018) and The Storm at the Door (2011) before turning to memoir. That’s evident in the control, structure and restraint of Homeschooled.
When Block was nine, his mother took him out of school because she believed conventional schooling was bad for him. Instead of giving him a better or freer education, she kept him cut off from ordinary life and trapped in a home environment driven by her own needs and fearful delusions.
The memoir traces that life, the damage done to him, and the fact that no-one stepped in to stop it. But Block seems more interested in the texture of that childhood. The book is not powerful only because parts of it are shocking. What matters just as much is the everyday experience of living through it, the boredom, the confusion and the way it slowly distorted his feelings and sense of reality.
As an adult, he had to work out how to describe what happened to him once he finally had enough distance and understanding to make sense of it. In trying to understand a childhood devoid of normality, he has produced a work that is serious about what memory can and cannot do.
The woman who changed children’s books
Judy Blume: A Life by Mark Oppenheimer
An accomplished biographer, memoirist and cultural historian, Mark Oppenheimer’s previous works include Knocking on Heaven’s Door (2003), Wisenheimer (2010), Squirrel Hill (2021) and The Newish Jewish Encyclopedia (2019). That makes him a good fit for his subject.
Judy Blume, with Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970) and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing (1972), helped change children’s and young adult fiction by writing openly about bodies, sex, shame, friendship, divorce and adolescence in a way that was direct, realistic and respectful of young readers in the 1970s and 1980s.
Oppenheimer’s biography treats her as more than a beloved children’s writer. It shows her as a serious, ambitious author. Refusing to be held back by family life, relationships, censorship battles and a changing publishing world, Blume’s influence is easily underestimated because her approach became so widespread.
That is what gives the book its value. Oppenheimer does not only retell Blume’s life, but it also places her in a larger literary history. For long-time readers, Judy Blume: A Life adds depth and context to her writing. For newer readers, Oppenheimer makes clear why Blume matters in modern popular literature for young people.
The man and the myth
Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited by Tracy Daugherty
Tracy Daugherty has written several major biographies, including Hiding Man (2009) on Donald Barthelme, Just One Catch (2011) on Joseph Heller, The Last Love Song (2015) on Joan Didion, and Larry McMurtry: A Life (2023). With Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited, he takes on a writer whose public image had already hardened into myth by the time he died on June 13 2023.
Alongside Herman Melville and William Faulkner, McCarthy is often placed among America’s greatest writers. Among his most celebrated works are Blood Meridian (1985), All the Pretty Horses (1992), No Country for Old Men (2005) and The Road (2006). By the end of his life, McCarthy was known not only for his masterful novels but for his private, austere life and his close ties to the violence and harsh landscapes of his fiction.
Due in October, Daugherty’s book is a full-scale literary biography that traces McCarthy’s rise from poverty and obscurity to worldwide acclaim, while examining the toll that life took on his marriages, family relationships and friendships.
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