Shiver: The Lessons of the Lochs - AS FEATURED ON BBC RADIO 4 WOMAN’S HOUR - Hardcover

Lowe, Brigid

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1783969563 ISBN 13: 9781783969562

Publisher: Elliott & Thompson Limited, 2026

Synopsis

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AS FEATURED ON WOMAN’S HOUR – BBC RADIO 4

A COAST BOOK OF THE MONTH

After Brigid Lowe’s life is upended, she turns to Scotland’s wild waters for refuge and for reckoning. Drawn deeper by their bone cold comfort, she set herself a challenge: to swim a thousand lochs.

And so her adventures begin: stepping into ice and caves and sacred springs, she swims with birds, conger eels and seals, in lochs held in dripping forest, towering mountains and ancient moor, alone and with her children in tow. Immersed in these secret pools, with their vaulting chasms and softer shallows, she tests the line between recklessness and safety, pain and pleasure – and, at last, life and death – discovering new depths of strength, endurance and fluent potential.

Shiver is a love-letter to Scotland – its flowers and rocks, myths and legends, highlands and islands – and to its chill waters, which swept Brigid off her feet only to carry her back home again.

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‘A book to bring delight to lovers of water in all its forms and manifestations, to wild swimmers and lovers of wildness, gorgeous landscapes and, above all, of Scotland.’ Esther Woolfson, author of Corvus

‘As clear and magical as the Highland lochs and as filled with colour as the Hebridean seas in which she swims.’ Annie Worsley, author of Windswept

‘Luminous, graceful, and immersive... its greatest gift lingers long after the final page is closed, like a long-forgotten call to return to the watery world of our wild selves.’ Victoria Bennett, author of The Apothecary By the Sea

WINNER OF THE RSL GILES ST AUBYN AWARD FOR NON-FICTION

About this title

About the Author

Brigid Lowe grew up in a remote Welsh-speaking community on Ynys Môn, with her younger sister and Irish immigrant parents. She now lives with her children in that part of Scotland known as Yr Hen Ogledd – The Old North – formerly joined with Wales in one Cumbric nation. She studied literature at Bangor, completed a doctorate at Oxford, and went on to teach and research at Sheffield and Cambridge Universities. Brigid traces her descent from travellers, circus performers, mill workers and gallowglass warriors. She takes photographs of flowers, forages her food, clambers pinnacles, and swims in ice and caves and bottomless pools.

Her debut novel, The Bloody Branch, the first in a sequence of retellings of the founding Welsh myths of the Mabinogion, will be published by Harvill (PRH), in January 2026.

Edition details

• Publisher: Elliott & Thompson Limited
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783969563
• ISBN 13: 9781783969562
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288