Swimming Home
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Swimming Home
Pre-order for $15.75
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Narrated by:
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By:
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Deborah Levy
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD’S AUTHOR OF THE YEAR
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
“Exquisite.” ―The New Yorker
“Readers will have to resist the temptation to hurry up in order to find out what happens...Our reward is the enjoyable, if unsettling, experience of being pitched into the deep waters of Levy's wry, accomplished novel.” —The New York Times Book Review
“An excellent story, told with subtlety and menacing tension.” ―The Wall Street Journal
As he arrives with his family at the villa in the hills above Nice, France, 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?
Deborah Levy's writing combines linguistic virtuosity, technical brilliance and a strong sense of what it means to be alive. A subversively brilliant study of love, Swimming Home reveals how the most devastating secrets are the ones we keep from ourselves.
Critic reviews
Finalist for the Man Booker Prize
A New York Times Notable Book
"A stealthily devastating book. . . . Levy manipulates light and shadow with artfulness. She transfixes the reader: we recognize the thing of darkness in us all. This is an intelligent, pulsating literary beast."
—The Telegraph (UK)
"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."
—Times Literary Supplement
"As the reader is drawn beneath the placid surface of her characters' experiences, Levy reveals a more urgent world humming with symbols."
—Literary Review
"Exquisite. . . . Levy's sense of dramatic form, as she hastens us toward the grim finale, is unerring, and her prose effortlessly summons people and landscapes."
—The New Yorker
"Elegant . . . subtle . . . uncanny. . . . The seductive pleasure of Levy's prose stems from its layered brilliance."
—The Washington Post
"Here is an excellent story, told with the subtlety and menacing tension of a veteran playwright."
—The Wall Street Journal
"Wholly new, fresh, and, yes, profound. . . . [Swimming Home] floats like a wasp, and stings like one too."
—The Denver Post
"Swimming Home is constructed like a play—with a central stage and a cast of characters, and it unfolds like a drama in hot short vignettes—but it reads like a novel, and Levy jumps in and out of her character’s heads with such ferocious abandon that the story becomes a sun-splashed psychotic episode, an exploration of desire turned masochistic and lives propelled by the arrhythmic pulse of insanity. . . . The writing in Swimming Home is lean and enigmatic. . . . The short scenes pop and sear."
—Los Angeles Review of Books
"Swimming Home is unlike anything but itself. Its originality lies in its ellipses, its patterns, and repetitions, in what it discloses and reveals, and in the peculiar curio cabinet Levy has constructed: a collection of objects and details that disclose more about these fictional men and women than they are willing, or able, to tell us about themselves. . . . [Levy adds] levels of complication that go beneath the sunny surface to get at something darker and more substantial. . . . Readers will have to resist the temptation to hurry up in order to find out what happens during and after Joe and Kitty’s wild ride along the coast because Swimming Home should be read with care. . . . Our reward is the enjoyable, if unsettling, experience of being pitched into the deep waters of Levy’s wry, accomplished novel."
—The New York Times Book Review
A New York Times Notable Book
"A stealthily devastating book. . . . Levy manipulates light and shadow with artfulness. She transfixes the reader: we recognize the thing of darkness in us all. This is an intelligent, pulsating literary beast."
—The Telegraph (UK)
"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."
—Times Literary Supplement
"As the reader is drawn beneath the placid surface of her characters' experiences, Levy reveals a more urgent world humming with symbols."
—Literary Review
"Exquisite. . . . Levy's sense of dramatic form, as she hastens us toward the grim finale, is unerring, and her prose effortlessly summons people and landscapes."
—The New Yorker
"Elegant . . . subtle . . . uncanny. . . . The seductive pleasure of Levy's prose stems from its layered brilliance."
—The Washington Post
"Here is an excellent story, told with the subtlety and menacing tension of a veteran playwright."
—The Wall Street Journal
"Wholly new, fresh, and, yes, profound. . . . [Swimming Home] floats like a wasp, and stings like one too."
—The Denver Post
"Swimming Home is constructed like a play—with a central stage and a cast of characters, and it unfolds like a drama in hot short vignettes—but it reads like a novel, and Levy jumps in and out of her character’s heads with such ferocious abandon that the story becomes a sun-splashed psychotic episode, an exploration of desire turned masochistic and lives propelled by the arrhythmic pulse of insanity. . . . The writing in Swimming Home is lean and enigmatic. . . . The short scenes pop and sear."
—Los Angeles Review of Books
"Swimming Home is unlike anything but itself. Its originality lies in its ellipses, its patterns, and repetitions, in what it discloses and reveals, and in the peculiar curio cabinet Levy has constructed: a collection of objects and details that disclose more about these fictional men and women than they are willing, or able, to tell us about themselves. . . . [Levy adds] levels of complication that go beneath the sunny surface to get at something darker and more substantial. . . . Readers will have to resist the temptation to hurry up in order to find out what happens during and after Joe and Kitty’s wild ride along the coast because Swimming Home should be read with care. . . . Our reward is the enjoyable, if unsettling, experience of being pitched into the deep waters of Levy’s wry, accomplished novel."
—The New York Times Book Review
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