The highly anticipated new novel. When a young single woman in Tokyo decides she’s ready to
sell anything—even her womb—to escape the precarity of her life an agency pairs her with a
wealthy couple desperate to have a child. The match seems made in heaven. She even looks a
little like the wife. But is anything ever that simple? Nothing has ever gone right for Riki.
She left her boring hometown in Hokkaido where she worked at a nursing home for a better life
in Tokyo. But as a temp in the big city she has no job security and barely scrapes by. She
eats the same old discount boiled egg for lunch every day sometimes for dinner too. Many of
her peers have to take on a side hustle just to make ends meet. So when her friend discovers an
agency offering a hefty sum for egg donation both leap at the chance for an interview.
Meanwhile former ballet star Motoi Kusaoke and his wife Yuko have been trying to conceive
for years. After trying what feels like every available option it seems futile—until Motoi
dives deep into his research and learns that while surrogacy is technically illegal in Japan
there is a company that’s found a loophole. Before long everyone has an opinion on the
matter: from Yuko’s sex-obsessed asexual best friend to Motoi’s controlling prima ballerina
mother and even the affable sex-worker-slash-therapist that Riki has been to a couple of times
after she accepted a down payment to be a surrogate. Acutely funny and addictively
page-turning Swallows pulls at the seams of society reassessing our understanding of
motherhood self-worth bodily autonomy and class. What does it mean to be “in control”? And
can money really buy happiness?
