Deborah Levy

A group of British tourists renting a villa on the French Riviera comes apart at the seams when a sexy, mysterious young woman walks into their midst and is invited by one of them to stay.

Swimming Home

Shelby Doherty

She told him she would have liked to feel his love fall upon her like rain. That was the kind of rain she most longed for in their unconventional marriage.

'It's always raining if you're feeling sad.'

The image of Kitty Finch in perpetual rain, walking in rain, sleeping in rain, shopping and swimming and collecting plants in rain, intrigued him.

Her determination not to love him seemed to have renewed her energy.

She had come to the conclusion that she was not satiated with love for Peter Sheridan and exchanged a respectable life of unhappiness for the unrespectable unhappiness of being a woman who had cut her ties with love.

And of the apricot jam he spooned into his mouth straight from the jar. He said the jam changed the weather inside him, but she didn't know what the weather was in the first place.

And then he took out his notebook and the black ink pen that had disappeared that morning, know that Isabel was defeated every time he appeared to be writing and every time he talked about their daughter. These were his weapons to silence his wife and keep her in his life, to keep his family intact, flawed and hostile but still a family.

'Oh, I've decided not to for a while. You know... it's quite a relief to feel miserable again.'

Madeleine Sheridan, who believed human beings had to suffer real hardships before they agreed to lose their minds, told her in a steely voice to stop making that noise.

Nina Saarinen

A mysterious woman who suffers from mental illness suddenly appears at a vacation villa where two families are staying and her interactions with them reveal secret details about their past and tensions within their relationships with each other.

This book was both beautiful and enrapturing, however I feel that I didn’t quite grasp Deborah Levy’s deeper meaning and couldn’t connect to the book in the way I felt I should. Levy’s writing is a marvel though and I will come back to this book at another time I think. 

Laura Gill

Milk

Forced and artificial at times, ok at others.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and selected as a New York Times Notable Book, Swimming Home is a sexy psychological thriller from a highly acclaimed writer. Poet Joe and his war-correspondent wife Isabel arrive with their daughter and another couple to a rented villa in the south of France to discover a body floating face down in the swimming pool. But the girl is very much alive. She is Kitty Finch: a sexy, mysterious young woman who walks naked out of the water and straight into the heart of their holiday. But why is she there? What does she want from them all? And why does Joe’s enigmatic wife invite her to stay? Taking place over a single week, Swimming Home reveals how a group of beautiful, flawed tourists in the French Riviera come loose at the seams. Both profound and thrilling, Deborah Levy explores what it means to be alive and how the most devastating secrets are the ones we keep from ourselves.

Swimming Home

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