Swimming Home

2012 MAN BOOKER PRIZE SHORTLISTED. Swimming Home is a subversive page-turner, a merciless gaze at the insidious harm that depression can have on apparently stable, well-turned-out people. Set in a summer villa, the story is tautly structured, taking place over a single week in which a group of beautiful, flawed tourists in the French Riviera come loose at the seams. Deborah Levy's writing combines linguistic virtuosity, technical brilliance and a strong sense of what it means to be alive. Swimming Home represents a new direction for a major writer. In this book, the wildness and the danger are all the more powerful for resting just beneath the surface. With its deep psychology, biting humour and deceptively light surface, it wears its darkness lightly.

ISBN	1908276029	DEWEY edition	DC23
ISBN13	9781908276025 (What's this?)	Weight (grammes)	249
Publisher	And Other Stories	Reprint date	15-Aug-2012 12:00:00 am
Imprint	And Other Stories	Published in	High Wycombe
Format	Paperback	Height (mm)	210
Publication date	08 Aug 2011	Width (mm)	140
Writer of introduction	Tom McCarthy	Spine width (mm)	18
DEWEY	823.92	Academic level	General

'Deborah Levy's storytelling is allusive, elliptical and disturbing. Her touch is gentle, often funny and always acute - This is a prizewinner.' Julia Pascal, The Independent ---- A stealthily devastating book - Levy manipulates light and shadow with artfulness. She transfixes the reader - This is an intelligent, pulsating literary beast.' Philip Womack, The Daily Telegraph ---- 'Swimming Home is a statement on the power of the unsaid. Magisterial - Themes, phrases and images recur in rhythmic cycles through this fugal novel. Levy's cinematic clarity and momentum convey confusion with remarkable lucidity.' Abigail Deutsch, TLS ---- 'Deborah Levy has made something strange and new - spiky and unsettling. In Swimming Home, home is elusive, safety is unlikely, and the reader closes the book both satisfied and unnerved.' John Self, The Guardian ---- 'Swimming Home is as sharp as a wasp sting.' Christina Petrie, Sunday Times ---- 'A compact treasure.' Boyd Tonkin, in his round-up of the year's best fiction, The Independent ---- 'Dark, sometimes humorous, intriguing and tragic, Levy's tale held me captive from its dramatic beginning' Lucy Popescu, The Tablet ---- 'Levy's strength is her originality of thought and expression.' Jeanette Winterson ---- 'I made notes to read as much as I can find by Deborah Levy' Bookslut.com ---- 'She is one of the few contemporary British writers comfortable on a world stage.' New Statesman ---- 'The strange brilliance of her imagination' The Independent ---- 'Levy is an exciting writer, sharp and shocking as the knives her characters wield.' Sunday Times

Be the first to write a customer review

Customers who bought this also bought: