Simone Atangana Bekono

A bold, unsettling, surprisingly tender debut novel for readers of Nightcrawling and fans of I May Destroy You. Salomé Atabong is the sixteen-year-old daughter of a Cameroonian father and a Dutch mother, living in the Netherlands. She arrives at a juvenile detention center to start a six-month sentence for a violent crime, which she did commit but does not regret. Expected to visit with a racist psychologist and perform her apologies, Salomé refuses to atone. But even if Salomé could get home, it would be no refuge: her father has recently been diagnosed with liver cancer, and her elder sister Miriam’s main preoccupation is to get out of the village as soon as possible. After months in the prison system, she realizes she must come to terms with her anger, sorrow, and guilt, as well as the crime she has committed and the real reason behind her rage. Raw, unsentimental, but lyrically written, Confrontations captures the paradoxical demands society makes on Black women, the way communities, schools, and the prison system perpetuate racism, and the cost of Black female defiance.