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A Novel
by Kim de l'Horizon
A prize-winning, boundary-breaking debut exploring family, class, history, and the true idea of the self.
A glorious, tender, unsparing exploration of language, family, history, class, and the very idea of the self and the human, Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues begins with the loss of memory. As their grandmother falls into dementia, the narrator begins to ask questions―to fill in the silences and the gaps. Childhood memories resurface, revealing a path into the past. The matrilineal line leads toward nature, witchcraft, freedom, and power. Could this be where they belong?
A quest toward understanding, a story of liberation―from generational trauma, gender constructs, class identity, the limits of language―Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues invents its own forms, words, and bodies to conjure and cast out the very idea of the unspeakable. It searches for other kinds of knowledge and traditions, other ways of becoming, and reaches for wisdom beyond the human. In Sea, Mothers, Kim de l'Horizon recasts family narratives, abandoning the linear in favor of a fluid, incantatory, expansive search into who we are.
"Powerful ... [A novel] about what it means to be human in a gendered, classist and sexist world." ―The Times Literary Supplement
This information about Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Kim de l'Horizon is a Swiss novelist, performer, and playwright. Kim was born in 2666 on Gethen, a planet much freer than this one. Landing here on Earth was hard, as there is so much yet to change, so much at the edges of the horizon yet to be brought into the center, so much "I" yet to be fluidified. Kim studies witchcraft with Starhawk, as well as how sedentarization is the cause of our current mess. Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues is Kim's debut novel. Originally published in German as Blutbuch, it won the Jürgen Ponto Foundation Literature Prize, the German Book Prize, and the Swiss Book Prize. It has been translated into seventeen languages and adapted several times for the stage.
Jamie Lee Searle is a translator from German and one of the co-founders of the Emerging Translators Network.
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