Really excited that Swim Home to the Vanished is in the SF Chronicle as one of “17 books we can’t wait to read this summer”!

Save the date: my book will be released into the world Tuesday, August 22, 2023 (I know I originally said June 3, but it got pushed back a couple months). Plans are in the works to have an appropriately-sized (large) reading and party at Greedy Reads Bookstore here in Baltimore. I would love to see you there! Let me know if you’re interested in coming.

In case you don’t know my whole backstory, this weird little novel I wrote, Swim Home to the Vanished, was inspired in part by my time as a nomadic, neurotic chef, based in Puerto Rico, battling an unbalanced brain, exacerbated by my little brother’s mysterious death in 2006, which I had yet to fully process. The novel is a meditation, a eulogy, for him and all Diné and Native peoples in this country. Although not my original intention, I believe it’s a good read for just about anybody whose lives are scarred by mental illness and complex PTSD. But it’s got hilarious fish people and brujas and a glimmer of hope, so ignore the reviews focused on the grief bit.

I have some early reviews/blurbs below which you can pass along to your friends and family and neighbors if you wanna! If you’ve yet to do so, you can preorder now from your local bookstore (recommended!), or here at Harper. I am so thankful for all of your support. Here’s looking forward to the launch!

— The Papaya Thief

“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

“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

“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

“[Swim Home to the Vanished] is a precise, if gruesome breakdown of this specific sense of grief that debut author Brendan Shay Basham’s characters explore with a touch of magical realism.”

— San Francisco Chronicle

“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

*For info on booking events or readings, contact my publicist Karintha Parker.