English introduction
Toulon will soon put a face to this year’s French literary season. On 25 September, Charlemagne bookshop will welcome Hemley Boum for a discussion of Nos vies sauvages, her new novel from Gallimard. The Cameroonian writer once again brings individual lives into contact with the political history of her country. This time, an imprisoned lawyer opens a story about power, corruption, love and resistance.

English article

The French rentrée littéraire is usually described as an avalanche of books. Hundreds of novels reach bookshop tables within a matter of weeks, the first literary prizes begin to take shape and a small number of titles gradually dominate the conversation.

In Toulon, one of the events scheduled to extend the season beyond the bookshop window will offer something rather different: time for a conversation. On Friday 25 September, from 6.30pm to 8pm, Charlemagne Toulon will welcome Hemley Boum for an event devoted to her new novel, Nos vies sauvages.

The book itself arrives earlier. Gallimard will publish the 336-page novel in its Blanche collection on 20 August. Nos vies sauvages returns Boum’s fiction to Cameroon and places politics firmly at the centre of the narrative.

A lawyer confronting power

The novel begins in Cameroon in 2018.

Ndolo Elimbi is a lawyer. Her opposition to the regime has led to her imprisonment in Yaoundé. Behind bars, memories return of Enow Alaka, a former lover turned political opponent who has been forced into exile. Another woman, police commissioner Zeinabou Ndam, occupies a crucial position in the story. She knows the workings of the regime from within and understands the compromises on which it depends.

The structure allows Boum to bring several histories together: a love story, the different choices faced by women, and the story of a country in which remaining faithful to one’s convictions can carry a very tangible cost.

Gallimard presents the novel as a broad portrait of political disillusionment, corruption and the power women can acquire when they act together. Rather than confining itself to the period of its protagonist’s imprisonment, the narrative reaches across several decades of Cameroonian history.

That political dimension is not a departure from Boum’s previous work. It continues one of its most persistent concerns: telling history through individuals, families, love affairs, silences and the fractures passed from one generation to another.

History without abandoning fiction

Hemley Boum was born in Cameroon and grew up in Douala. She studied anthropology before continuing her education in international trade in France, later working in business before devoting herself to writing. In her novels, Cameroonian history has never been merely a backdrop.

Les Maquisards explored the struggle for Cameroonian independence and received the Grand Prix littéraire d’Afrique noire. Les Jours viennent et passent followed several generations living through the country’s political and social upheavals and later violence. It won the Prix Ahmadou-Kourouma in 2020.

In 2024, Le Rêve du pêcheur brought together two periods and two lives: Zack, who leaves Cameroon and becomes a clinical psychologist in Paris, and his grandfather Zacharias, a fisherman whose community is transformed by economic exploitation. The novel examined exile and family transmission alongside the exploitation of natural resources and the destruction of fragile local economies.

The book brought Boum further recognition, including the Sciences Po literary prize in 2024 and the Grand prix Afrique in 2025.

Nos vies sauvages therefore arrives after a period of considerable critical recognition, although the interest of the new novel does not depend on the number of awards attached to its author’s name.

What emerges from the material available before publication is the continuation of a literary project: examining what large political events do to individual lives.

Politics through its consequences

Writing fiction about dictatorship or corruption always carries a danger: the subject can become so large that the characters disappear behind it.

Boum’s earlier novels suggest another method. Collective history enters fiction because it disrupts a love affair, a village, a family, an ambition or a departure. Politics does not hover above the characters; it enters their lives and alters what is possible for them.

Nos vies sauvages appears to take that approach particularly far.

A lawyer loses her freedom because she opposes those in power. A man has been forced into exile. A police commissioner understands the compromises on which the system functions. These different positions allow the same political order to be viewed from several directions rather than through a simple division between flawless heroes and anonymous representatives of authority.

The prominence of female characters also continues a pattern across Boum’s writing. Her women do not simply witness a political history written by others. They transmit memories, resist, adapt to constraints and make decisions whose consequences can travel across generations.

More than a signing session

That gives the Toulon event an interest beyond a conventional author signing.

Meeting a novelist several weeks after publication allows readers to escape the peculiar rhythm of the rentrée littéraire, when dozens of new covers compete for attention before anyone has had much time to read them.

By 25 September, Nos vies sauvages will have been in bookshops for just over a month. Readers will have had time to form their own views, allowing the discussion to focus on the novel itself: its structure, its relationship with Cameroonian history, its characters and the role politics plays in Boum’s fiction.

In a city where literary attention can sometimes concentrate around major annual occasions such as the Fête du livre du Var, a bookshop event serves a different purpose. It places literature in a smaller and more regular setting, where a genuine exchange between writer and readers is possible.

The literary season reaches Toulon too

It is easy to think of the French rentrée littéraire as an overwhelmingly Parisian phenomenon: publishing houses based in the capital, major prize juries, national media coverage and hundreds of coordinated releases.

Books only truly begin their lives, however, once they start circulating.

They reach bookshop tables. Booksellers recommend them. Readers borrow them, discuss them, abandon them and sometimes return to them. Writers leave the national interview circuit and meet a few dozen or a few hundred readers in individual towns.

That is what will happen in Toulon with Hemley Boum.

Nos vies sauvages will be published by Gallimard on Thursday 20 August. Just over a month later, on Friday 25 September, Hemley Boum will be at Charlemagne Toulon from 6.30pm to 8pm to meet readers.

Between those two dates lies something literary-season calendars sometimes overlook: enough time to read the book.