Breathe on four. Define your terms. What is this desire?

Attuned to a body in motion, Swim pulls the reader beneath the logic of prose, into the eroticism of language itself. The arcing rhythm of a body breathing - a woman marking her birth as she swims in a pool - sustains the unique and hypnotic language that becomes the medium through which this story moves.

Swim entwines the present with those past actions and consequences that have brought Kat to the Greek mountain village where her father was born. She swims laps while her fourteen-year-old daughter reclines on a chaise lounge, poolside, reading a book. Without ever leaving the pool we enter discrete scenes with Kat’s parents, daughter, husband and lover. On entering each point in this history, Kat reveals an undertow of sound, rhythm and words in their rippling meanings. Each new lap moves Kat closer to her impending decision: whether she will leave her husband. But the deeper tension within this innovative novel derives from the writing itself – its vital urgency that extends the possibilities of narrative beyond the fixed and into the fluid.

Acclaimed writer and critic Marianne Apostolides is the author of five books and one play. Her current writing explores the contact zone between genres – poetry vs. prose, fiction vs. non-fiction, creative vs. critical; it has appeared in The Walrus, Room, and Bookninja.com Magazine, among other publications. She is the recipient of the 2012 Chalmers Arts Fellowship; her book Voluptuous Pleasure was listed among the Top 100 Books of 2012 by Toronto’s Globe & Mail, and her book The Lucky Child was long-listed for the 2010 Relit Award. Marianne lives in Toronto with her two children.

Marianne Apostolides' profile page

Swim was chosen for the ‘Best Books Ever’ column on the website Girls Can Create.

"brilliantly structured stream-of-consciousness novel...fans of lyric prose will savour this intelligent, finely crafted text" - Jodi Lundgren via Canadian Literature