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.

Deborah Levy writes fiction, plays, and poetry. She is the author of highly praised novels, including Beautiful Mutants, Swallowing Geography, and Billy and Girl. Swimming Home, her most recent novel, was serialized on BBC Radio 4 as a Book at Bedtime and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Deborah Levy's profile page

• Commended, Amazon.ca Best Books: Editors' Picks
• Commended, New York Times Notable Books
• Short-listed, Man Booker Prize
• Commended, Huffington Post Best Books
• Short-listed, Waterstones UK Author of the Year
• Short-listed, Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Award

Exquisite ... [Levy] effortlessly summons people and landscapes.

New Yorker

Swimming Home [has] adequate literary heft and staying power to keep it vital not just this year, but next.

Denver Post

... utterly beautiful and lyrical throughout, even at the most tragic turns ... deserving of the widest readership.

Kirkus

A qualified triumph.

Sydney Morning Herald

...dark and erotic...elegant language and subtle, uncanny plot...the seductive pleasure of Levy’s prose stems from its layered brilliance.

Washington Post

Swimming Home is a beautiful, delicate book underpinned by a complexity that only reveals itself slowly to the reader.

Financial Times

Levy can tell a story, no doubt about that, but it is her use of language, as well as her subversive streak, that makes her intriguing, even a bit dangerous.

Irish Times

... spare, disturbing and frequently funny ... unlike anything but itself ... [a] wry, accomplished novel.

New York Times

A lot of fun to read.

LA Review of Books

... an excellent story, told with subtlety and menacing tension ...

Wall Street Journal