Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues

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

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, 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.

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. Kim studies witchcraft with Starhawk and contributes to Delirium magazine. Their debut novel, Blutbuch (Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues), won the Jürgen Ponto Foundation Prize, the German Book Prize, and the Swiss Book Prize.

Jamie Lee Searle is a literary translator from German and Portuguese whose publications include Kalmann by Joachim B. Schmidt and Twelve Nights by Urs Faes. She is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and a cofounder of the Emerging Translators Network.