Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues

Blutbuch

Kim de l'Horizon (born 1992)

Translated by Jamie Lee Searle

In English

Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues

Farrar, Straus and Giroux · United States · 26 August 2025 · 336 pages
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Blood Book

Hodder & Stoughton · United Kingdom · 2025 · 336 pages

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The narrator identifies as neither man nor woman. Raised in a shabby Swiss suburb, they now live in Zurich, have escaped the narrow world they come from and feel at home in their non-binary body. Then their grandmother, the 'Grossmeer' in Bernese German, develops dementia. The copper beech in her garden, planted when she was born, is where everything starts and where everything leads. As the grandmother loses her knowledge and her dominance, the narrator begins to find a language of their own for identity and body, origin and inheritance, and for what gets passed on unasked: gender, trauma, class.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

303 pages in the original

Genres

Family (assigned by AI)

Set in

Switzerland

First published

2022 by DuMont Buchverlag

Author's age

30 when first published

ISBN

9783832182083 (original)

9780374612375 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, United States)

9781399731423 (Hodder & Stoughton, United Kingdom)

More

Wikidata

Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues

English editions

About the book