A01=Kim de l'Horizon
Author_Kim de l'Horizon
award-winning writer
Category=FS
Category=VFV
celebrated
debut novel
eq_bestseller
eq_health-lifestyle
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
family
generational trauma
german book prize
identity
international fiction
international writers
lgbt
lgbtq
literary fiction
literature in translation
nonbinary
poetic
powerful
queer
sharp
swiss german
swiss literature
switzerland
Product details
- ISBN 9780374612375
- Dimensions: 135 x 208mm
- Publication Date: 22 Sep 2025
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
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.
