Swimming

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.