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.

Author: Kim de l'Horizon
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 08/26/2025
Pages: 336
Weight: 0.95lbs
Size: 8.49h x 5.74w x 1.13d
ISBN: 9780374612375