
The author of Waterstones Book Club featured title, Our Endless Numbered Days returns with a poignant story of love and loss.
Gil Coleman looked down from the window and saw his dead wife standing on the pavement below.
Gil's wife, Ingrid has been missing, presumed drowned, for twelve years.
A possible sighting brings their children, Nan and Flora, home, to the old swimming pavilion where they grew up. Together they begin to confront the mystery of their mother through letters left scattered behind in books that litter the house.
Is Ingrid dead? Or did she leave? And do the letters hidden within Gil's books hold the answer to the truth behind his marriage, a truth hidden from everyone including his own children?
Interweaving two narratives of daughters searching for a buried truth and a life told through letters from a woman long-gone Swimming Lessons is a strange and affecting novel about the gaps in our knowledge of each other. It is a story about ghosts: the ghost of a woman who vanished, the ghost of a life only partly known and the ghosts of lives left behind in the wake of profound and life-changing loss.
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN: 9780241976371
Number of pages: 304
Weight: 213 g
Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 18 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
"Thrilling, transporting, delicately realised and held together by a sophisticated sense of suspense . . . more than matches the power of Fuller's debut . . . Powerful , pleasing and pleasurable." - Sunday Times
"A compelling portrait of a complicated, unconventional marriage, and of flawed humanity, with all its secrets, silences and deceits. Excellent." - Mail on Sunday
"It's the sharp eye for detail, sometimes bizarre, that makes her writing stand out . . . A story suffused with the poignancy of miscommunication between people who love each other, of the things we can never really know. " - Guardian
"With Swimming Lessons, Fuller confirms herself as a writer of emotional depth, technical skill and sensitive plotting . . . What Fuller evokes beautifully are the complicated dynamics between fathers and daughters, sisters, lovers, friends." - Observer
"A deeply moving read, with a mystery that keeps you turning pages." - Oprah.com
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“Beautiful and often times heartbreaking.”
Swimming Lessons is a character-driven novel about a family, a love, a marriage, and how hope can be the worst thing sometimes. Here, the hope of Gil Coleman and his daughters, Nan and Flora, has haunted the family... More
“Swimming Lessons is a bewitching and original story”
I was so impressed by Claire Fuller's debut novel, Our Endless Numbered Days. I read it pre-publication and I was delighted when it went on to be such a huge success, and won the Desmond Elliott Book Prize 2015.... More
“Not Waving But Drowning”
'Swimming Lessons' is the second novel from the award winning Claire Fuller and concerns the deceits and concealments that families deal in, much to everyone's detriment. I have long accepted the notion... More
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