Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues - Hardcover

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by Kim de l'Horizon (Author), Jamie Lee Searle (Translator)

Winner of the German Book Prize, the Swiss Book Prize, and the Jürgen Ponto Foundation Literature Prize

A prizewinning, boundary-breaking debut exploring family, class, history, and the true idea of the self.

A glorious, tender, unsparing exploration of language, family, history, class, 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 maternal line leads toward nature, witchcraft, freedom, and power. Could this be where the narrator belongs?

A quest toward understanding, a story of liberation--from generational trauma, gender constructs, class identity, the limits of language--this narrative 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, Swallow, Tongues, Kim de l'Horizon reimagines family narratives, abandoning the linear in favor of a fluid, incantatory, expansive search into who we are.

Author Biography

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 translates literature from the German and the Portuguese. Her publications include Twelve Nights, by Urs Faes; Kalmann, by Joachim B. Schmidt; and a cotranslation of Angela Merkel's memoir, Freedom. She is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and a cofounder of the Emerging Translators Network.

Number of Pages: 336

Dimensions: 1.13 x 8.49 x 5.74 IN

Publication Date: August 26, 2025