Swimming Lessons - Softcover

Fuller, Claire

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241976375 ISBN 13: 9780241976371

Publisher: Penguin, 2018

Synopsis

Ingrid Coleman writes letters to her husband, Gil, about the truth of their marriage, but instead of giving them to him, she hides each in the thousands of books he has collected over the years. When Ingrid has written her final letter, she disappears from a Dorset beach, leaving behind her beautiful but dilapidated house by the sea, her husband, and her two daughters, Flora and Nan.

Twelve years after her disappearance, Gil thinks he sees Ingrid from a bookshop window, but he's getting older, and this unlikely sighting is chalked up to senility. Flora, who has never believed her mother drowned, returns home to care for her father and to try to finally discover what happened to Ingrid. But what Flora doesn't realize is that the answers to her questions are hidden in the books that surround her. Sexy and whip-smart, Swimming Lessons holds the Coleman family up to the light, exposing the mysterious and complicated truths of a passionate and troubled marriage.

About this title

Review:

An Amazon Best Book of February 2017: A famous elderly author looks out the window of a bookstore and thinks he sees his deceased wife. Upset by this event, he takes a near-fatal tumble and winds up in the hospital. Flora, his youngest daughter, returns home to help care for him—shortly thereafter, letters from her mother will be discovered hidden inside the books of her father’s prized library. Thus begin two plotlines, as Flora and her sister care for their father, and as their mother’s letters lay out her side of the marriage—starting with their first meeting when she was a student and he was a professor. Is their mother dead now, or did she run away? And what other secrets are hidden inside the letters? Well-paced and finely detailed, Swimming Lessons is a mystery about an uncoiling family that will keep you turning pages and cause your loyalties to ebb and flow like a tide. --Chris Schluep, The Amazon Book Review

About the Author:

Claire Fuller's debut novel, Our Endless Numbered Days, won the Desmond Elliott Prize in the UK, was a finalist in the ABA (American Booksellers Association) 2016 Indies Best Books Award, and was selected by Powells as an indiespensible book.
Her second novel, Swimming Lessons, will be published in February 2017.
Claire lives in Winchester, England, with her husband and has two grown-up children.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0241976375
• ISBN 13: 9780241976371
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304