Patrice Nganang's Novel, "Mount Pleasant", Now Available on Pre-Order

Publication date set for 12 April 2016.

Patrice Nganang. (April 2016). Mount Pleasant. A Novel (Translated from French by Amy Baram Reid). Farrar Straus Giroux. 384 pages. Click here to pre-order your copy on Amazon. $26.00.

A lyrical tale of transformation in colonial Africa

In Cameroon in 1931, Sara is taken from her family and brought to Mount Pleasant as a gift for Sultan Njoya, the Bamum leader cast into exile by French colonialists. Just nine years old and on the verge of becoming one of the sultan's hundreds of wives, Sara's story takes an unexpected turn when she is recognized by Bertha, the slave in charge of training Njoya's brides, as Nebu, the son she lost tragically years before. In Sara's new life as a boy she bears witness to the world of Sultan Njoya--a magical yet declining place of artistic and intellectual minds--and hears the story of the sultan's last days in the Palace of All Dreams and of the sad fate of Nebu, the greatest artist their culture had seen.

Seven decades later, a student returns home to Cameroon to research the place it once was, and she finds Sara, silent for decades, ready to tell her story. In her serpentine tale, a lost kingdom lives again in the compromised intersection between flawed memory, tangled fiction, and faintly discernible truth. In this telling, history is invented anew and transformed--a man awakens from a coma to find the animal kingdom dancing a waltz; a spirit haunts a cocoa plantation; and a sculptor re-creates his lost love in a work of art that challenges the boundary between truth and the ideal. The award-winning novelist Patrice Nganang's lyrical and majestic Mount Pleasant is a resurrection of the world of early-twentieth-century Cameroon and an elegy for the men and women swept up in the forces of colonization.

About the Author

Patrice Nganang was born in Cameroon and is a novelist, a poet, and an essayist. His novel Temps de chien received the Prix Littéraire Marguerite Yourcenar and the Grand prix littéraire d'Afrique noire. He is also the author of La Joie de vivre, L'Invention d'un beau regard and La Saison des prunes. He teaches comparative literature at Stony Brook University.

Comments

[G]

thanks for sharing will definitely order

[GT]

THE WRITER'S ROOM - PATRICE NGANANG
(From The New York Times)

WHEN I’M AT HOME, I write just about everywhere, but usually I start in the living room before migrating to the garden. The garden is my favorite place, although the weather restricts my use of it to the spring and summer. It is an inhabited space: lightning bugs during the night, birds during the day and even a deer in winter. Last winter, a deer stayed with us for a full month — sitting under the magnolia tree I write under in the summer, sheltering herself from the snow. My main writing companion is a cardinal, whom I call the Cardinal, as he is the king of our garden. Sometimes he knocks at the window of my office in the house, as if to remind me of the garden’s call.

I sit on the red bench, my papers and notebooks scattered around me. Pondering is the major part of my writing. It is during those moments that the garden disappears and becomes the world I write, transforming itself into the city of my birth, Yaounde, in Cameroon. I stop writing at midday, in the garden, under the tree.
Winters and rainy days are another story. The cabin is one of the reasons why I was attracted to our hundred-year-old house. Its original function was to serve as a home for ducks, chickens and rabbits. Now I use it to work on my novel, and to retreat from the weather, the house, the garden and the Cardinal.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/08/21/t-magazine/Jeanette-Winterson-David-Hare-Jane-Smiley-writers-room.html

[GT]

Step Inside Patrice Nganang's Room
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2015/08/23/t-magazine/writer-s-room-patrice-nganang/s/23womens-well-writers-slide-XFXJ.html