Confrontations

For readers of Nightcrawling and fans of I MAY DESTROY YOU, a bold, unsettling, and heartbreaking debut novel about race, identity, and belonging.

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. Salomé feels no remorse for what she has done but is expected to visit with a racist psychologist and perform her apologies. 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.

Salomé would love to withdraw from the world, to be invisible, but the world instead mercilessly thrusts itself upon her. After months in the prison system, she realizes that to come to terms with her time in prison, she must face the real reason for her rage.

Raw, unsentimental, and surprisingly tender, Confrontations captures the paradoxical demands society makes on Black women.