Swimming Lessons - Softcover

Fuller, Claire

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1941040934 ISBN 13: 9781941040935

Publisher: Tin House Books, 2018

Synopsis

An exhilarating literary mystery, Swimming Lessons keeps readers guessing until the final page.

Disenchanted by the life in which she’s found herself, Ingrid Coleman writes letters to her husband, Gil, about the truth of their passionate and troubled marriage. She hides them, unread, in the thousands of books Gil has collected over the years. Then she disappears from a Dorset beach, leaving behind her dilapidated house by the sea, her husband, and her two young daughters, Flora and Nan.

Twelve years later, Gil thinks he sees Ingrid from a bookshop window, but he’s getting older and his unlikely sighting is chalked up to senility. Flora, who has never believed Ingrid drowned, returns home to care for her father and investigate her mother’s disappearance. But what Flora doesn’t realize is that the answers to her questions are hidden in the books that surround her. Scandalous and smart, Swimming Lessons holds the Coleman family up to the light, exposing the mysterious truths of a turbulent marriage and the dangerous fault lines that remain.

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 was born in Oxfordshire, England, in 1967. She gained a degree in sculpture from Winchester School of Art, but went on to have a long career in marketing and didn't start writing until she was forty. She has written two other novels, Our Endless Numbered Days, which won the Desmond Elliott Prize, and Swimming Lessons. She has an MA in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Winchester and lives in Hampshire with her husband and two children.

About this edition

• Publisher: Tin House Books
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1941040934
• ISBN 13: 9781941040935
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 354