Swimmer

By: Bill Broady

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Paperback | 16 October 2000

At a Glance

Paperback
144 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
19.7 x 12.8 x 0.9

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She swims into the medals and then into oblivion - a sensuous, searing, compact debut from an outstanding new British writer.

This is a striking, supple and direct debut from a new English writer that both promises an exceptionally exciting future and provides an unusual, accomplished and saleable debut. It's a character piece, charting the life of a girl who becomes besotted with butterflies and swimming on the same holiday when an infant, then grows up to become a world-class swimmer before, at 19, obsolescence overtakes her with disorienting haste... If taken on its own terms - as an intense and focused portrait - it is simply staggering; a miniature, but a perfect one. It is stuffed with gorgeously apt and fresh imagery and has tremendous verve about it. It reads, in fact, like a race, as it should.

Industry Reviews

This lyrical first short novel focuses on a young girl's relationship with the water and her natural aptitude for swimming. Her talents push her into the world of competitions, culminating in a gold medal win at the Commonwealth Games, after which we watch her decline into small-time promotional work and mental illness. Her relationship with the water is imbued with an other-worldliness, an ethereal beauty and a sexuality: when she enters the water she is transformed, and towards the end of a race, she almost loses consciousness. Broady writes unusually in the second person singular, parodying This is Your Life, the television show that only shows the best of a person as his narrator reveals everything about his young subject. An impressive, poetic debut. (Kirkus UK)

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