Bako Thomas lives a solitary life, a calm centre in an increasingly unstable world. The City outside his apartment is sliding towards a dystopia as a fuel crisis holds citizens to ransom. He is down to his final chance with Avé, his girlfriend of two years, and his relationship with his neighbours, The Law, Gebu and Mimi is fraught with anxiety and tension. When a tragedy forces him to go on the run, he soon finds himself being roped into the murky world of politics and corruption he thought he had left behind for good.
Odafe Atogun’s writing is spare, profound and thought-provoking. It examines socio-political constructs in ways similar to Kafka, Camus and Orwell. In his masterful hands, a simple story about the nature of corruption becomes something much deeper, a question about whether or not a man can actually ever be truly free.
“The Cabal is an unsparing look at political power, the choices that it drives human beings to make, and the limits of individual resistance to it. Atogun’s austere, pared- back prose lifts the veil of platitudes that often covers the wielding of power, confronts the degradation that it causes, and never flinches. A novel that is both visceral and necessary.”
– Gautam Bhatia, author of The Wall and The Horizon