Publishers Weekly
06/26/2023
Basham’s ambitious if meandering debut finds inspiration in Navajo creation myths to tell a story of loss and family. Damien, who is Diné and a Colorado-based chef, quits his job six months after the body of his younger brother, Kai, washes ashore on the Pacific Coast, near where he’d been hiking during a storm surge. A dreamlike travel sequence ensues as Damien sets out for the coast. He drives his truck south until it breaks down, then hitchhikes and train-hops across a desert. When he arrives at a small seaside village, he’s entranced by a family of women who run a local eatery. Matriarch Ana María offers Damien a job to replace her daughter, Carla, who recently died under mysterious circumstances. Once he accepts, Ana María clouds Damien’s mind with her homemade mescal. Meanwhile, Carla’s sisters, Marta and Paola, share with him their certainty that Ana María was involved in Carla’s murder. Mixed within the narrative are elements of the fantastic, from Damien believing he is turning into a fish to Ana María’s origin story in which she is a lizard. Though the many detours sap momentum, Basham shines in his depictions of Damien’s yearning and catharsis. Despite the shambolic structure, readers will find much to admire in the author’s unique voice. Agent: P.J. Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
Swim Home to the Vanished is a lush and fantastic journey through strange lands and minds from an incandescent new voice full of my kind of melancholic brilliance and unromantic magic. The book devastates buoyantly, sensually, like some culinary chimera rising from heretofore unknown waters to take you under and wrap you like a song. Brendan Basham’s novel is the announcement of an emerging writer fully formed.” — Tommy Orange, author of There There
"Basham shines in his depictions of Damien’s yearning and catharsis. . . . Readers will find much to admire in the author’s unique voice." — Publishers Weekly
"Swim Home to the Vanished is a lush, soulful saga about profound loss and the mysteries of carrying on under its weight. An audacious debut novel bristling with insight, imagination, and real heart." — Claire Vaye Watkins, author of I Love You, But I've Chosen Darkness
"Sumptuous, mysterious. . . . [Readers] can revel in being swept away by Basham's creation of a sensually rich world in constant and often violent change." — Booklist
"In Swim Home to the Vanished, Brendan Basham has delivered a profoundly moving novel of originality, full of grief and hope. It is a bold and powerful new work of fiction." — Brandon Hobson, author of The Removed
“Basham’s debut novel is complex and enigmatic, featuring a mythic sensibility and elements of magical realism, including the early stages of Damien’s metamorphosis into a fish and other characters’ taking on the physical characteristics of lizards and insects. The novel’s prose is lush and evocative, and there’s an almost erotic charge to Basham’s writing about food, a central element in the story.” — Kirkus Reviews
“Basham has a particular gift for transmuting inner intangible turmoils into corporeal form; the various characters’ physical transformations from human to creature are a creative epigenetic exploration of the ways in which trauma and grief shape who we are.” — BookPage
“An incantatory trip through place and time, fueled by grief and animated by magic. . . . Right away, we know we are to be guided by a writer (Basham is Diné) with an ear for poetry who also is attuned to the lasting scars caused by westward colonial expansion in the United States. . . . Out of this emerge scenes full of natural wonder, deeply imagined and described in bravura prose, the novelistic equivalent of a big-screen final reel.” — Star Tribune
"Swim Home to the Vanished powerfully explores the lasting impact of grief and redemption by interweaving Diné history and traditional myths." — Electric Literature, "16 New Books by Indigenous Authors You Should Be Reading"
New York Times bestselling author Tommy Orange
A lush and fantastic journey through strange lands and minds from an incandescent new voice full of my kind of melancholic brilliance and unromantic magic.”
SEPTEMBER 2023 -- AudioFile
Shaun Taylor-Corbett performs this immersive audiobook in a restrained style. He modulates his voice depending on the scene, shifting his tone to reflect the various characters and authentically delivering the Diné language that is sprinkled through the text. Taylor-Corbett inhabits the soul of Damien, who has just lost his younger brother. He seeks refuge from his wounds by traveling to a mysterious seacoast town that is ruled by a powerful female family who run a dockside eatery. Magical realism colors this fine debut novel. People develop gills, tails, and hard shells, and the sea and its power over life and death is omnipresent. The author takes listeners on a journey that is part origin story, part evocation of climate disasters, and entirely worth listening to. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2023-06-08
A young Diné man fleeing a tragic past encounters an equally fraught present.
Six months after his younger brother Kai’s drowning death, Damien, a restaurant chef who’s still wracked by grief at that loss and the earlier unexplained disappearances of his parents, quits his job and departs on a hallucinatory journey that will transport him to an environment even more discomfiting than the one he’s desperate to escape. That setting is an impoverished seaside village where Damien is drawn into the complex dynamics of a family of three women—Ana María and her daughters Paola and Marta—who themselves are mourning the recent murder of their daughter and sibling, Carla. Damien goes to work in the family’s makeshift food service operation on the beach, and he’s soon exposed to the sisters’ suspicions that their mother was involved in both Carla’s death and the earlier disappearance of their father at sea. Paola and Marta try to enlist Damien in their plots and counterplots against their despised mother, who exerts a sort of domination over the village owing largely to her unexplained ability to replenish a fish supply decimated by overfishing. The clashes among these three women, who may be brujas, climax in the chaos of an apocalyptic hurricane that’s described in terrifying detail. Basham’s debut novel is complex and enigmatic, featuring a mythic sensibility and elements of magical realism, including the early stages of Damien’s metamorphosis into a fish and other characters’ taking on the physical characteristics of lizards and insects. The novel’s prose is lush and evocative, and there’s an almost erotic charge to Basham’s writing about food, a central element in the story. He tries to give the novel a larger thematic resonance by alluding to the tragedy of the Long Walk—the dispossession of Damien’s ancestors, some 10,000 members of the Navajo (Diné) tribe in the 1860s—as well as the impact of climate change.
An ambitious first novel whose intriguing parts never fully come together into a satisfying whole.
