When We Swallowed the Sea

A captivating debut novel from an award-winning literary translator, an intimate family saga following a lineage of Korean female divers that reckons with myth and memory, survival and sorrow, and exile and return.

To a haenyeo, breath is everything. Own the breath you’re given—nothing more, nothing less. It decides how far, how deep you go.

Jeju, 1999. Soom, a daughter of generations of sea women who plunge into the depths so their families might eat, dives one last time. On the anniversary of her sister’s death, she makes a devastating decision to protect her mother, and now she must flee the island and everything she’s ever known. Carrying the memory of her drowned sister, she makes her way to Seoul, and then to New York City. Alone in a strange land, Soom walks into a shop whose owners speak the language of the home she left behind, and when she meets their son, she wonders if she has ever felt alive before him. Here, she begins to build a life and love all her own. But Soom knows the sea is always keeping count . . . and soon she feels the water threatening to close over everything.

Exquisitely told across nine voices and three generations, When We Swallowed the Sea is an unforgettable family portrait of daughters and mothers, exploring love, loss, inheritance, and homecoming. It asks what it means to carry unbearable grief and whether we can ever outrun our fates, revealing that letting go is the only way to live.