Swimming - Softcover

Keegan, Nicola

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0701182857 ISBN 13: 9780701182854

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 2009

Synopsis

World-class swimming isn't all breathing and technique; for Philomena - reluctantly known to the world as Pip - it is a necessity. Haunted by a litany of childhood tragedy, trapped by her hysterically agoraphobic mother and three other sisters ticking down to detonation, and chilled by the long wimpled shadow of her deeply Catholic community, Pip is as burdened by the living as she is by the sibling and father whose deaths consume her. In landlocked Kansas, water is her element. The fifty metres of the swimming pool provide her with a much needed escape, reducing the otherwise unmanageable trauma of adolescence to her own freakish grace and speed, and to the rhythmic, controlled pumping of arms, legs, and lungs. As her furious talent garners ever more attention, Pip struggles to find a balance between increasingly divergent versions of herself: a loyal daughter of Kansas, an Olympic superstar in the international spotlight, a girl with her history in the water, and an uncertain future on land.

Nicola Keegan's astonishing debut novel glides with the same dazzling confidence Pip shows in the racing lane. A novel about obsession, about failure, about pain, about what it means to have a gift and what it takes to compete, about the hunger for salvation, survival, and triumph - graceful, raw, hilarious, and breathtaking in the precision of what it reveals, Swimming unhesitatingly marks the arrival of a singularly exciting new talent.

About this title

Review:

If Jane Bowles and Gerard Manley Hopkins had a lovechild, she might just possibly write as gloriously as Nicola Keegan. Swimming is a novel for people who love donut holes, or the dead, or dogs, or nuns, or fat people, or world class athletes, or the English language, or pretty much anything. It should be read, re-read, dreamed about, quoted to friends, and enacted as a shimmery odd hilarious mystery play. Swimming is simply magnificent. (Rivka Galchen, Author Of Atmospheric Disturbances)

Nicola Keegan has pulled off a coup with her first novel. Swimming is as entertaining as it is deeply moving, a story of loss that is - against all odds - also a jubilation. (Lauren Groff, author of The Monsters of Templeton)

I loved SWIMMING! It's the most original novel I've read all year. I can't get Pip's voice out of my mind. Give yourself a treat this summer-read this book. (Judy Blume)

Nicola Keegan's prose is filled with inventive riffs...[She] stitches all of this adeptly to deliver a classy fiction about the tenuous relationship of worldly success to the intimate self. (Independent)

Book Description:

Here is a debut not to be missed - a ferocious, unusual, funny, exuberantly alive new voice in fiction, with a dark edge that's reminiscent of Lionel Shriver.

About this edition

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0701182857
• ISBN 13: 9780701182854
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320