Swallow

by Sefi Atta

Overview

Now a Netflix original film, Swallow is brought to us from the award-winning author Sefi Atta

In the 1980s in Lagos, the government’s War Against Indiscipline and austerity measures are in full swing. A succession of unfortunate events leads Tolani, a bank secretary, to be persuaded by her roommate Rose to consider drug trafficking as a way to make a living. Tolani’s subsequent struggle with temptation forces her to reconsider her morality—and that of her mother Arike’s—as she embarks on a turbulent journey of self-discovery.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781566568333
Publisher:	Interlink Publishing Group, Incorporated
Publication date:	11/01/2012
Pages:	268
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Sefi Atta was born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1964. She is the author of Everything Good Will Come, Swallow, News from Home, A Bit of Difference and Sefi Atta: Selected Plays. Atta has received several literary awards, including the 2006 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa and the 2009 Noma Award for Publishing in Africa. Her radio plays have been broadcast by the BBC and her stage plays have been performed internationally. She divides her time between the United States, England and Nigeria.

Editorial Reviews

In Atta's spirited and largehearted second novel (after the collection, News from Home), two young woman office workers navigate the rapids of the urban jungle of Lagos. Rose, and the narrator, Tolani, live and work together, making the long, arduous daily commute by bus and sharing "seats, sweat, and gossip." They often don't agree: Rose, at 30, flits from man to man to avoid falling into what she calls "the black hole" of dependency and inertia, and disapproves of Tolani's longtime boyfriend, Sanwo, who won't propose. However, Rose's irrepressible temper gets her fired, leaving her vulnerable to the manipulation of a new boyfriend, OC, who convinces her to mule drugs to England. Tolani has her own woes: she breaks up with Sanwo after he loses her savings; she has to work with a new, lecherous boss; her aging mother is ever more fragile; and she learns her father, now dead, may not have actually been her father. But will she take OC up on his offer of quick money? Tolani's tale encompasses towns and villages, corruption and superstition, deceit and loyalty, all beautifully layered and building toward a wallop you never see coming. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"In Atta's spirited and largehearted second novel (after the collection, "News from Home"), two young woman office workers navigate the rapids of the urban jungle of Lagos. Rose, and the narrator, Tolani, live and work together, making the long, arduous daily commute by bus and sharing "seats, sweat, and gossip." They often don't agree: Rose, at 30, flits from man to man to avoid falling into what she calls "the black hole" of dependency and inertia, and disapproves of Tolani's longtime boyfriend, Sanwo, who won't propose. However, Rose's irrepressible temper gets her fired, leaving her vulnerable to the manipulation of a new boyfriend, OC, who convinces her to mule drugs to England. Tolani has her own woes: she breaks up with Sanwo after he loses her savings; she has to work with a new, lecherous boss; her aging mother is ever more fragile; and she learns her father, now dead, may not have actually been her father. But will she take OC up on his offer of quick money? Tolani's tale encompasses towns and villages, corruption and superstition, deceit and loyalty, all beautifully layered and building toward a wallop you never see coming."

From the Publisher

In this unique novel, outstanding new literary talent Sefi Atta takes great strides in style and form, to bring wit and passion to the heartbreaking story of Tolani and Rose, two young women struggling, not always successfully, to make an honest living in contemporary Nigeria... Atta tells in an eminently readable voice the irreconcilable nature of the two friends' fates.

Tsitsi Dangarembga

The bustle, chaos and fast rhythm of Lagos jump from the pages of 'Swallow', Sefi Atta's new book. It is fiction steeped in life.

Veronique Tadjo

Sefi Atta has woven a quietly intricate powerful tale that pulls from problems of gender, class, and Lagosian life. It's a novel whose many colorful characters, compelling story, distinct place and turbulent time will stay with you long after you've read the last word.

Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu

Sefi's 'Swallow' is a triumph of the terse. It throbs with laconic intelligence and the veritable Sefi Atta denouement.

Tade Ipadeola

Tender, fierce, vivid and memorable-a bold, distinctive novel from a writer who doesn't compromise her integrity.

Leila Aboulela

No contemporary Nigerian writer is better than Sefi Atta at evoking the smells, sounds and the sheer madness of this sprawling cosmopolitan city of Lagos.

Toni Kan Onwordi

Recommended Reading... Sefi Atta's Swallow wakes up in dusty, hazy Lagos and sets its sights on Rose and Tolani, a pair of young women whose intertwined fates argue the power of matrilineal ties in modern Africa... the girls live the slim privileges of the employed- in a city whose poverty, government crackdowns, and quick, senseless losses lend the novel an apocalyptic air. Against this stark backdrop, Rose and narrator Tolani emerge as two halves of a butterflied Rorschach blot: nearly identical, but with one side webbed and shadowed, the other precise, distinct. What sets them apart is their people- more particularly, the women who buoy them up: Rose's hedging, prostituting, city-clinging mother and half-sisters, and Tolani's village-tied mother, the last of a matriarchal adire-dying, husband-defying line. As the novel's tragic action draws both young women into desperate attempts to evade poverty, this familial distinction grows all the more significant, stark and elegant, but warmly humorous and lively... For both women, it seems, the greatest fear is the loss of the other, which would equal a loss of the self. Atta's skillful handling is a relief and a gift.

A Christian Review Books and Culture

In Swallow, Mississippi-based Sefi Atta travels the distance to 1980s Lagos, Nigeria, where she grew up, to offer a picture of how gender oppression reproduces itself over time through the imposed act of swallowing. ...Atta makes the act of forcing oneself to swallow the unswallowable, the deadly, vivid in the body of the reader.

make/shift

Atta (Everything Good Will Come, 2007) focuses on two women fighting against sexual harassment and trying to make a meaningful life in Nigeria.

Rose and Tolani (the novel's narrator) share both a friendship and a workplace—a bank in Lagos—but at the beginning of the novel, Rose is sacked for refusing the advances of the repulsive Mr. Salako, a senior manager. While Rose is somewhat relieved to be out of an awkward situation, she's mortified when Tolani is named to her position—and Tolani also finds herself harassed by the relentless Salako. Rose is fundamentally unhappy being Nigerian and instead wishes "she had been born in Czechoslovakia because the name sounded sophisticated." Besides Salako, Tolani has problems with her lover Sanwo, who can't quite commit either to a job or to her. She wants to give him an ultimatum that she hopes will result in marriage, but she's fearful of the possible consequences because she finds it hard to imagine her life without him. Meanwhile, the increasingly desperate Rose takes up with OC, recently returned from a successful yet mysterious business deal in America. OC's sleaziness makes Tolani uneasy, and her friendship with Rose—like her relationship with Sanwo—begins to falter. Tolani's intuitions about OC turn out to be correct, for he's a drug dealer who wants to use them both as mules to transport heroin in condoms to the States. Neither Rose nor Tolani can quite get the hang of swallowing the undigestible packages, and Tolani eventually decides on moral grounds that she doesn't want to be exploited in this way. In increasingly distressed financial condition, Rose winds up being OC's drug courier but dies when the package "explodes" inside her. By the end of the narrative, Tolani, who comes from a small Yoruba village, decides that life in Lagos is too wretched and corrupt, so she returns home to her mother, looking to start afresh—and include Sanwo in her future.

Atta writes lyrically and eloquently about ordinary life.

Kirkus Reviews