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A sweeping, emotionally resonant, multigenerational novel from award-winning Cameroonian author Hemley Boum, tracing the fate of a family divided by migration, memory, and the violent reshaping of their homeland.
“Boum is a magnificent storyteller.”—Le Monde
Winner of the Grand Prix Afrique 2025 and the Prix des cinq continents de la Francophonie 2025, The Fisherman’s Dream is a brilliantly crafted novel that braids together the destinies of a grandfather and grandson, each carrying the weight of a world transformed by globalization, displacement, and the delicate inheritance of love.
Zacharias is a fisherman in Campo, a coastal village in southern Cameroon. His community—shaped for generations by the river’s rhythms and the meeting of forest and ocean—is upended by the arrival of logging companies, industrial trawlers, and predatory economic interests that exploit both land and people. Violence, upheaval, and irreversible change tear apart Zacharias’s family.
Decades later, his grandson—also named Zacharias—has fled Douala for Paris’s 18th arrondissement. Isolated and adrift, Zack is haunted by a grandfather he never knew and a country whose wounds he carries in his body. The novel moves back and forth across eras and continents, revealing the long arc of memory and the things that are passed across generations.
A work of rare lyricism and political force, The Fisherman’s Dream explores migration, ecological devastation, colonialism and its aftermath, and the rupture of traditional worlds, all while telling a moving multi-generational family story.
PRAISE FOR HEMLEY BOUM
“Hemley Boum captures the beating heart of a people and their history.”—Le Monde
“A powerful, polyphonic writer of immense generosity.”—Jeune Afrique
“Boum reweaves memory and political violence with rare finesse.”—Radio France Internationale (RFI)
“Her writing is luminous, lucid, compassionate.”—Le Figaro Littéraire
“One of the most important voices in contemporary African literature.”—RFI Afrique
“There’s something of Tolstoy’s War and Peace in this epic novel...Anna and her family are archetypes of the tragedy of human existence, which may be the true subject of the talented novelist Hemley Boum’s work.”—Radio France Internationale