Swim home to the vanished /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Shortlisted for the Reading the West Book Award in the Debut Fiction

"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."--Tommy Orange, author of There, There

After the death of his brother, a grief-stricken young man seeks refuge and oblivion in a secluded fishing village dominated by a family of brujas in this haunting debut novel, inspired, in part, by the ramifications of Diné history and thought--a mesmerizing, original tale in the tradition of works by Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, and Gabriel García Márquez.

When the river swallowed Kai, Damien's little brother didn't die so much as vanish. As the unbearable loss settles deeper into his bones, Damien, a small-town line cook, walks away from everything he has ever known. Driving as far south as his old truck and his legs allow, he lands in a fishing village beyond the reach of his past where he hopes he can finally forget.

But the village has grief of its own. The same day that Damien arrives, a young woman from the community's most powerful family is being laid to rest. A stranger in town, Damien is the object of gossip and suspicion, ignored by all except the dead girl's mother, Ana Maria, who offers Damien a room and a job.

Grateful for her kindness, Damien soon begins to fall under Ana Maria's charismatic spell. But how long can he resist the rumors swirling through town suggesting she might have had something to do with her daughter's death? Or deny his strange kinship with one of Ana Maria's surviving daughters, Marta, who knows too well the grief that follows the loss of a sibling--and who is driven by a fierce need for revenge? Swiftly, Damien finds himself caught in a power struggle between the brujas, a whirlwind battle that threatens to sweep the whole village out to sea.

Resonant with the Diné creation story and the unshakeable weight of the Long Walk--the forced removal of the Navajo from their land--Swim Home to the Vanished explores the human capacity for grief and redemption, and the lasting effects it has on the soul.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

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.)

Booklist Review

Diné author Basham's sumptuous, mysterious debut novel reaches far into the territory of magical realism as it follows its hero, a chef, on a journey towards the sea and his own transformation. Mourning the recent death of his brother by drowning and the less recent disappearance of his parents, Damien is deep in grief and somehow, unaccountably turning into a fish. He leaves his job somewhere in the northwestern U.S. to travel by foot through deserts and mountains, until he washes up in a fishing village, apparently by the ocean in Mexico. Here, he ends up cooking for a restaurant owned by two sisters and their mother, who might all be brujas or possibly caimans or insects, and who definitely blame each other for the death of a third sister. When a hurricane threatens to destroy the village, Damien is forced to take sides. Readers willing to sacrifice a need for coherent explanations can revel in being swept away by Basham's creation of a sensually rich world in constant and often violent change.

Kirkus Book Review

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.