Swimming

Reviews / Votes

A significant, dazzling debut -- Kate Saunders * The Times * [A] ravishing first novel...gorgeous * New York Times * Told with wry, understated compassion, this engrossing novel ponders the challenges of growing up gifted -- Hephzibah Anderson * Daily Mail * Keegan's vivid, splashy prose and off-the-wall humour suit the story of the harrowing traumas of an adolescence...Swimming's, moving, exhilarating story of love, sport, triumph and loss is pretty much a winner -- Tina Jackson * Metro * Keegan's shimmering, fluid prose is outwardly playful, yet this is a seriously well-crafted novel -- Catherine Taylor * Guardian * Nicola Keegan's prose is filled with inventive riffs to draw out the poignant turbulences of her heroine, both in the water and out. Reading the book becomes itself like a long, sinuous surge through the pool...Keegan stitches all of this adeptly to deliver a classy fiction about the tenuous relationship of worldly success to the intimate self -- Peter Carty * Independent * Beautifully written ... An ultimately joyful book about surviving emotional trauma, Swimming is also a remarkable portrait of the self-absorption and sacrifice needed to win gold -- Adrian Turpin * Financial Times * 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 Written with verve and bursts of wild humour', 'It's an enlightening plunge into a world that we all come to know more about soon -- Emma Hagestadt * Independent *