Notre quelque part

A village in the Ghanaian hinterland. Sonokrom, where men and women speak the language of the forest, distil time the way one distils palm wine, and walk alongside the spirits of their ancestors. Then a young woman arrives by car — her eyes, as the old hunter puts it, unable to keep still — and follows a smell into the abandoned hut of a man named Kofi Atta. What she finds there sets in motion two worlds that nothing, at first glance, has prepared to understand each other.

It is Yao Poku, veteran hunter and seasoned storyteller, who takes charge of the narrative. His voice opens the novel the way a griot opens a session — with the promise of telling the story before it grows cold. In Accra, the ambitious Inspector Donkor, a devotee of American crime procedurals, dispatches Kayo to the village: a young forensic pathologist, recently returned from England, carrying his instruments, his scientific training, and the certainty that logic can dissolve even the most inexplicable of mysteries. Kayo arrives. The village listens. And slowly, patiently, the old hunter tells his story.

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