Blood Book
On sale
28th August 2025
Price: £18.99
WINNER OF THE GERMAN BOOK PRIZE, THE SWISS BOOK PRIZE AND THE JÜRGEN PONTO LITERATURE PRIZE
‘Powerful’
Times Literary Supplement
‘Formally adventurous’
New York Times
‘An exquisite inquiry into what it means to be an individual in a body, a family, a society, with all the attendant misery, humour, joy and enduring mystery’
Krystelle Bamford, author of Idle Grounds
As their grandmother slides into dementia, an unnamed narrator begins to ask questions – to fill in the gaps, to resist the silence that shrouds their family. Childhood memories resurface, revealing a path into the past, winding back through generations. This matrilineal line leads toward nature, witchcraft, freedom. Could this be where they belong?
What follows is an astounding quest for liberation – from generational trauma, class identity, the limits of language. It’s a search for other forms of knowledge and traditions, other ways of becoming. Bold and expansive, Blood Book is an unforgettable reckoning with the past, and a mesmerising exploration of who we are.
‘Everything about it is fantastic’
Die Welt
‘One can only marvel’
Die Zeit
‘An important new voice for a new form of writing’
Tages-Anzeiger
Published in the US as Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues
‘Powerful’
Times Literary Supplement
‘Formally adventurous’
New York Times
‘An exquisite inquiry into what it means to be an individual in a body, a family, a society, with all the attendant misery, humour, joy and enduring mystery’
Krystelle Bamford, author of Idle Grounds
As their grandmother slides into dementia, an unnamed narrator begins to ask questions – to fill in the gaps, to resist the silence that shrouds their family. Childhood memories resurface, revealing a path into the past, winding back through generations. This matrilineal line leads toward nature, witchcraft, freedom. Could this be where they belong?
What follows is an astounding quest for liberation – from generational trauma, class identity, the limits of language. It’s a search for other forms of knowledge and traditions, other ways of becoming. Bold and expansive, Blood Book is an unforgettable reckoning with the past, and a mesmerising exploration of who we are.
‘Everything about it is fantastic’
Die Welt
‘One can only marvel’
Die Zeit
‘An important new voice for a new form of writing’
Tages-Anzeiger
Published in the US as Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues
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Reviews
In Kim de l'Horizon's novel Blutbuch, the non-binary protagonist searches for their own language with an enormously creative energy. What narrative exists for a body that defies conventional notions of gender? Every linguistic attempt displays an urgency and literary innovation that provoked and enthralled the jury
Such a deep story with a gorgeous language. I am completely enthralled
Language becomes as fluid as bodies and identities: it sweeps you along in its current
An irrepressible literary talent
Blutbuch surprises and amazes again and again through the mutability of language, the play with forms and text flows, and above all through the clever and witty narrative style
One can only marvel at the literary mastery that de l'Horizon unfolds
An important new voice for a new form of writing
Formally adventurous
Observing memory and the deconstruction of family, language, and the queer body, Blood Book is an atlas that takes on so many challenging points, with an omnipotence that never loses its vastness
Kim de l'Horizon has managed that rare thing: an honest love letter. At once kaleidoscopic and urgent, Blood Book is an exquisite inquiry into what it means to be an individual in a body, a family, a society, with all the attendant misery, humour, joy and enduring mystery
Although the novel chronicles experiences that are relatively niche, the narrator's struggles transcend the specificity of what they are describing. This, ultimately, is what makes Blutbuch so powerful: it's not simply about the unique struggles of someone who is gender-fluid, but about what it means to be human in a gendered, classist, and sexist world
A touching, literarily opulent, utterly fascinating book
Kim de l'Horizon has won the German Book Prize and everything about it is fantastic . . . it is a story about the search for the language of one's own identity, a story of becoming and being oneself
A debut hard to be exceeded . . . A book of superpowers, of superheroines . . . This debut could move people like the great confessional texts by Édouard Louis, Annie Ernaux, Daniel Schreiber or Hanya Yanagihara did recently . . . With Blutbuch, Kim de l'Horizon has created something that belongs to the great promises of literature