Swimmer: A Novel

by Ashley Mace Havird

Available here and from any bookstore February 1, 2027

Swimmer

A Novel by Ashley Mace Havird

In the year 2482, when a massive wave submerges the Port of Atlanta, seventeen-year-old Ailana, a Homo cetacean Swimmer, is thrust barely alive from an underwater cave onto an island that should not exist. Here an Old One, the last of her kind and sole inhabitant of the Refuge, heals Ailana in body and mind.

Joined by a male Swimmer, an advanced prototype, Ailana must use her newly acquired knowledge to negotiate with the pod of hyper-intelligent dolphins that caused the Wave. At stake is the rescue of a submarine containing, among other human refugees, Ailana’s twin sister.

Swimmer is an adventure story, romance, and meditation on climate change, wealth inequality, and the assault on truth. Blending ecological insight and coming-of-age transformation, Swimmer is a modern fable, a beautiful and powerful fable about the hopeful reciprocity between human culture and nature. 

Advance Praise for Swimmer

Masterfully written, Swimmer showcases Ashley Mace Havird’s extraordinary talent in creating a believable post-apocalyptic world where authoritarianism exploits genetically modified survivors.

—Ian Thomas Shaw, author of Quill of the Dove and editor of Green to Grey: An Environmental Anthology

Ashley Mace Havird’s gripping and imaginative novel Swimmer envisions a dystopia several centuries in the future in which the forests have burned, the waters have been poisoned, the ice caps have melted, most animals are extinct, and the “masses [were] savages who fought wars over fuel, land, water.”  Ailana, genetically modified to become a Swimmer and gather vital nutrients and medicines from the ocean, is propelled by natural forces deeper than destruction to find a Refuge presided over by the healer-mystic-repository of knowledge MaSophie, whence Ailana sets out to rescue a small group of others from the deadly Port of Atlanta and establish a community where all—human and other than human—may live in wisdom and harmony. Given what we are doing to the environment, I could not put this prescient novel down.

—Ann Fisher-Wirth, coeditor of Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology, author of For What Is, Praise: New and Selected Poems

An adventure through a post-climate collapse future that is both as dystopian as it is tragically believable, referring to our present time as “The Age of Waste,” Swimmer pulls us deep into its world and lore with rip-tide prose, exploring what it means to be human when so much of our humanity has been stripped away. An incredibly compelling read.

—Ariel Francisco, author of All the Places We Love Have Been Left in Ruins

It is January 2482 and The Great Melt has made cityships the main refuge for humans and Swimmers the most valued beings on the planet.  Havird depicts this world of water and ruins in stunning, often excruciating detail.  The prose is as lyrical as the technology is ingenious; lines of classical poetry drift through the book. So does an endless stream of wisdom—much of it. in the end, cetacean.  Swimmer is masterful, visionary, and unforgettable.  

—Lise Weil, editor, Dark Matter: Women Witnessing