Swimming Home

Profound and thrilling, Deborah Levy’s novel  Swimming Home s a pulsating, subversively brilliant study of love, revealing how the most devastating secrets are the ones we keep from ourselves.

As he arrives with his family at a villa in the hills above Nice, Joe sees a body in the swimming pool. But the girl is very much alive. She is Kitty Finch: a self-proclaimed botanist with green-painted fingernails, walking naked out of the water and into the heart of their holiday. Why is she there? What does she want from them all? And why does Joe’s enigmatic wife allow her to remain?

"Exquisite….Levy’s sense of dramatic form, as she hastens us toward the grim finale, is unerring, and her precise, dispassionate prose effortlessly summons people and landscapes."  -  The New Yorker

"Levy’s elegant language and subtle, uncanny plot are strictly adult fare...The seductive pleasure of Levy’s prose stems from its layered brilliance...witty right up until it’s unbearably sad."  -  The Washington Post

Deborah Levy is the author of seven novels, and she has been shortlisted twice for the Goldsmiths Prize and three times for the Booker Prize. Her novels include Beautiful Mutants, Swallowing Geography, The Unloved, Billy and Girl, Swimming Home, Hot Milk and The Man Who Saw Everything. Her short story collection, Black Vodka, was nominated for the International Frank O’Connor Short Story Award.