Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

Shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize Shortlisted for the 2012 Specsavers National Book Awards (UK Author of the Year) Shortlisted for the 2013 Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize 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.

'Swimming Home is as sharp as a wasp sting.. Witty and poignant, its pages melt away like an unsettling yet familiar dream.' Sunday Times ---------- 'Deborah Levy has made something strange and new ... spiky and unsettling. In this novel, home is elusive, safety is unlikely, and the reader closes the book both satisfied and unnerved.' The Guardian ---------- 'A stealthily devastating book ... Levy manipulates light and shadow with artfulness. She transfixes the reader: we recognize the thing of darkness in us all. This is an intelligent, pulsating literary beast.' The Telegraph ---------- 'Swimming Home is a beautiful, delicate book underpinned by a complexity that only reveals itself slowly to the reader.' Financial Times ---------- 'This amazing novel is a haunting exploration of loss and longing. It has an epic quality.' The Independent ---------- '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.' Times Literary Supplement ---------- 'As the reader is drawn beneath the placid surface of her characters' experiences, Levy reveals a more urgent world humming with symbols.' Literary Review ---------- 'Exquisite ... Levy's sense of dramatic form, as she hastens us toward the grim finale, is unerring, and her prose effortlessly summons people and landscapes.' New Yorker ---------- 'Readers will have to resist the temptation to hurry up in order to find out what happens ... Our reward is the enjoyable, if unsettling, experience of being pitched into the deep waters of Levy's wry, accomplished novel.' New York Times ---------- 'Elegant ... subtle ... uncanny... The seductive pleasure of Levy's prose stems from its layered brilliance.' Washington Post ---------- 'Here is an excellent story, told with the subtlety and menacing tension of a veteran playwright.' Wall Street Journal

Deborah Levy is a British playwright, novelist and poet. Her novels include the Booker-shortlisted Swimming Home (2011) and Hot Milk (2016), and the Booker-longlisted The Man Who Saw Everything (2019). Deborah is also the author of a collection of short stories, Black Vodka (2013), and a trilogy of prize-winning Living Autobiographies: Things I Don’t Want to Know, The Cost of Living, and Real Estate.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781908276025
ISBN 10	1908276029
Title	Swimming Home
Author	Deborah Levy
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	And Other Stories
Year published	2011-10-06
Number of pages	165
Prizes	Short-listed for Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2012
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable