As he arrives with his family at the villa in the hills above Nice, Joe sees a body in the swimming pool. But the girl is very much alive. She is Kitty Finch: a self-proclaimed botanist with green-painted fingernails, walking naked out of the water and into the heart of their holiday. Why is she there? What does she want from them all? And why does Joe’s wife allow her to remain?
Swimming Home is a subversive page-turner, a merciless gaze at the insidious harm that depression can have on apparently stable, well-turned-out people. Set in a summer villa, the story is tautly structured, taking place over a single week in which a group of beautiful, flawed tourists in the French Riviera come loose at the seams.
Deborah Levy’s writing combines linguistic virtuosity, technical brilliance and a strong sense of what it means to be alive. Swimming Home represents a new direction for a major writer. In this book, the wildness and the danger are all the more powerful for resting just beneath the surface.
With its biting humour and immediate appeal, it wears its darkness lightly.
More Information
- To read what Tom McCarthy (author of Remainder, Men in Space and C) has to say about Swimming Home, sugar mice and Deborah Levy’s place in the UK literary scene, download a sneak preview of the Swimming Home introduction by Tom McCarthy (229)
- In November 2011′s Tatler (UK), Deborah Levy was named the month’s cool author.
- If you had subscribed to And Other Stories before this book’s publication, you would have received one of the limited number stamped, early copies of it and 3 other And Other Stories 2011 titles. Find out about subscribing to upcoming titles here.
Praise for Deborah Levy
- ‘Deborah Levy’s storytelling is allusive, elliptical and disturbing. Her touch is gentle, often funny and always acute… This is a prizewinner.’ Julia Pascal, The Independent
- ‘Swimming Home is a statement on the power of the unsaid. Magisterial … Themes, phrases and images recur in rhythmic cycles through this fugal novel. Levy’s cinematic clarity and momentum convey confusion with remarkable lucidity.’ Abigail Deutsch, TLS (21 Oct 2011)
- ‘Deborah Levy has made something strange and new … spiky and unsettling. In Swimming Home, home is elusive, safety is unlikely, and the reader closes the book both satisfied and unnerved.’ John Self, The Guardian
- ‘Swimming Home is as sharp as a wasp sting.’ Christina Petrie, Sunday Times (6 Nov 2011)
- ‘A compact treasure.’ Boyd Tonkin, in his round-up of the year’s best fiction, The Independent
- Dark, sometimes humorous, intriguing and tragic, Levy’s tale held me captive from its dramatic beginning’ Lucy Popescu, The Tablet
- ‘Levy’s strength is her originality of thought and expression.’ Jeanette Winterson
- ‘I made notes to read as much as I can find by Deborah Levy…’ Bookslut.com
- ‘She is one of the few contemporary British writers comfortable on a world stage.’ New Statesman
- ‘Levy’s prose throbs its way into the imagination.’ The Observer
- ‘Levy is an exciting writer, sharp and shocking as the knives her characters wield.’ Sunday Times
- ‘Delicate, calm, mysterious, both playful and terribly sad.’ Mary Gaitskill, New York Times
- ‘Lively, sharp, remarkably evocative with very few words, Levy is the best kind of “modern” writer’ Booklist (USA)
- ‘The strange brilliance of her imagination’ The Independent
- ‘Levy is consistently striking and successful when reinterpreting and creating new contexts for literary and dramatic ideas.’ TLS
