Breathe on four. Define your terms. What is this desire?
Attuned to a body in motion, Swim pulls the reader beneath the logic of prose, into the eroticism of language itself. The arcing rhythm of a body breathing—a woman marking her birth as she swims in a pool—sustains the unique and hypnotic language that becomes the medium through which this story moves.
Swim entwines the present with those past actions and consequences that have brought Kat to the Greek mountain village where her father was born. She swims laps while her fourteen-year-old daughter reclines on a chaise lounge, poolside, reading a book. Without ever leaving the pool we enter discrete scenes with Kat’s parents, daughter, husband and lover. On entering each point, Kat reveals an undertow of sound, rhythm and words in their rippling meanings.
Each new lap moves Kat closer to her impending decision: whether she will leave her husband. But the deeper tension of the novel derives from the writing itself—its vital urgency that extends the possibilities of narrative beyond the fixed and into the fluid.
Swim is available for purchase at your local bookstore, online, or directly from the publisher.
Praise for Swim:
Swim is a “brilliantly structured stream-of-consciousness novel… fans of lyric prose will savour this intelligent, finely crafted text”
—Jodi Lundgren, Canadian Literature
Swim is “handled with assured grace and dynamic lucidity”
—The Globe and Mail
“If ever there was a feminist beach read, Swim is it.”
—Cara Benson, Delirious Hem