Eddie Signwriter: A Novel

Synopsis

A stunning debut novel—its power and prose evocative of such diverse writers as Faulkner, Ondaatje, Nabokov, and Coetzee–about a young African’s international odyssey of self-discovery.

Kwasi Edward Michael Dankwa—Eddie Signwriter to his clients—is a twenty-year-old painter of murals and billboards in the city of Accra, Ghana, who is buffeted by forces beyond his control and understanding as he is swept up by the passions and machinations of others. Struggling with a forbidden relationship, banished from school, held responsible for the death of a notable woman in the community, Eddie flees overland to Senegal and then, illegally, to France, determined to find a new life for himself among the immigrant communities of Paris.
 
Following him across magnificently rendered African lands into the precincts of Paris, Eddie Signwriter gives us a spellbinding tale of rootlessness and desire, of disgrace and redemption, of politics both personal and global, of art and love. Empathic, wise, deeply humane, and luminously written, it heralds Adam Schwartzman as a writer of great promise.

The New York Times - Rob Nixon

…while Schwartzman, who has three volumes of poetry to his credit, doesn't yet seem entirely comfortable with the novel's longer form, Eddie Signwriter has ample compensations. Not least are its startling finale and its innumerable lyrical flourishes…Schwartzman writes superbly about the fatal misunderstandings that can occur between the generations: between rule-bound, scheming elders, envious of possibilities no longer open to them, and the young, who act impulsively in ways that may haunt them later. How far must we travel to escape that haunting? And who will follow us, in the loyal belief that we are better than we appeared to those whose all-powerful condemnation was both manipulative and unforgiving?