This award-winning novel, woven into the framework of eighteenth century West Africa, recounts the story of Queen Abraha Pokou's sacrifice of her son to save the Baoule people. But it is also much more than that. Telling and retelling the story, changing key elements each time - what if the queen saved her son? what if she went crazy from grief? what if she ended up on a slave ship?

In Cameroon, plum season is a highly anticipated time of year. But for the narrator of When the Plums Are Ripe, the poet Pouka, the season reminds him of the "time when our country had discovered the root not so much of its own violence as that of the world's own, and, in response, had thrown its sons who at that time were called Senegalese infantrymen into the desert, just as in the evenings the sellers throw all their still-unsold plums into the...