Swimming Lessons

The author of Waterstones Book Club featured title, Our Endless Numbered Days returns with a poignant story of love and loss. Gil Coleman looked down from the window and saw his dead wife standing on the pavement below. Gil's wife, Ingrid has been missing, presumed drowned, for twelve years. A possible sighting brings their children, Nan and Flora, home, to the old swimming pavilion where they grew up. Together they begin to confront the mystery of their mother through letters left scattered behind in books that litter the house. Is Ingrid dead? Or did she leave? And do the letters hidden within Gil's books hold the answer to the truth behind his marriage, a truth hidden from everyone including his own children? Interweaving two narratives of daughters searching for a buried truth and a life told through letters from a woman long-gone Swimming Lessons is a strange and affecting novel about the gaps in our knowledge of each other. It is a story about ghosts: the ghost of a woman who vanished, the ghost of a life only partly known and the ghosts of lives left behind in the wake of profound and life-changing loss.