Zacharias lives in southern Cameroon, where the Ntem River meets the Atlantic Ocean. Like generations of his family before him, he is a fisherman. His life is shaped by a delicate balance between family, the sea, and traditions passed down through generations. But when foreign companies arrive in the region, promising employment, financial security, and a more prosperous future, that balance begins to unravel. New aspirations, mounting debts, and growing economic dependence gradually transform village life—and with it, the fate of Zacharias’s family.

Decades later, his grandson Zack lives in Paris, where he works as a clinical psychologist and has built a life as a husband and father. Having fled Cameroon in his youth, he has tried to distance himself from his origins and sever his ties with the past. Yet childhood memories, family secrets, unresolved grief, and long-buried losses continue to follow him.

In Le Rêve du pêcheur, Hemley Boum interweaves the stories of grandfather and grandson, moving from Campo to Douala and from Douala to Paris. She creates a sweeping family saga about roots and exile, memory and forgetting, love and guilt, rupture and return. At its heart lies a powerful question: can we ever truly escape our past, or do the stories left untold—and the wounds left unhealed—continue to shape the lives of generations to come?