Swimmers in the Sea is a fiercely imagined novel by a newcomer to be watched. Author Denzil Strickland takes calamity and unflinchingly peels back the layers in this thrilling literary debut about a man who travels to pre-Katrina New Orleans to receive an unlikely inheritance from his estranged and dying father-a one-armed portrait artist convicted of manslaughter for the accident that killed his own two children and a newlywed couple leaving their wedding. At the age of thirty, Cliff Ebbets is broke and living in North Carolina, his marriage failing, when he receives a call from a man named Don Willis, his father's live-in companion. Don beckons Cliff to New Orleans for an inheritance he won't specify. Desperate but circumspect about anything to do with his father, Cliff concedes and travels back to the home of his earliest memory. There, he meets his father's friends, men from the underbelly of New Orleans' Ninth Ward, who paint a picture of Cecil Ebbets that Cliff doesn't recognize. It's the same picture that the ghost of his dead sister Rachel is showing him.The twist in this tale of love and betrayal comes at the outset and wrings back and forth on itself throughout its telling. Swimmers in the Sea is a story about the other family and the son who inherits the sins of his father. It's the story of how the story of your life can change. Just like that.