Swim Home to the Vanished by Brendan Shay Basham
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
SWIM HOME TO THE VANISHED journeys to a place that feels inescapable, bizarre, unknowable, and yet instinctually familiar. Multilayered and surreal, this novel challenges perception and resonates viscerally with feelings that most of us resist, bury, or look away from. Animal and human, living and dead, enemy and relative, obliterating and welcoming–these lines blur from beginning to end in the keen disorientation of grief that has claws, gills, and teeth. A sensational debut.
Basham’s narrative threads are knotted up tight, daring us to tug at them to see what yields.
We need more books like this: literary experiences that demand an active intellectual and emotional investment from the reader to reach understanding.
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