Overview

She swims into the medals and then into oblivion – a sensuous, searing, compact debut from an outstanding new British writer. This is a striking, supple and direct debut from a new English writer that both promises an exceptionally exciting future and provides an unusual, accomplished and saleable debut. It’s a character piece, charting the life of a girl who becomes besotted with butterflies and swimming on the same holiday when an infant, then grows up to become a world-class swimmer before, at 19, obsolescence overtakes her with disorienting haste… If taken on its own terms – as an intense and focused portrait – it is simply staggering; a miniature, but a perfect one. It is stuffed with gorgeously apt and fresh imagery and has tremendous verve about it. It reads, in fact, like a race, as it should.

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9780006551973

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Reviews

This lyrical first short novel focuses on a young girl's relationship with the water and her natural aptitude for swimming. Her talents push her into the world of competitions, culminating in a gold medal win at the Commonwealth Games, after which we watch her decline into small-time promotional work and mental illness. Her relationship with the water is imbued with an other-worldliness, an ethereal beauty and a sexuality: when she enters the water she is transformed, and towards the end of a race, she almost loses consciousness. Broady writes unusually in the second person singular, parodying This is Your Life, the television show that only shows the best of a person as his narrator reveals everything about his young subject. An impressive, poetic debut. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Formerly a croupier, a care worker and a cartographer, Broady was lodging in the attic of Bradford poet and poetry publisher David Tipton when a Littlewoods windfall allowed him to finish his first book. ‘Originally Swimmer started out as three poems. One day I was walking on Hampstead Heath with a terrible hangover and realised it was one project.’ An intense, stunningly original and lyrical novel, Swimmer was published to high acclaim by Flamingo last January. Bill Broady has been writing for years. ‘I had a mass of stuff – four novels and a massive prose poem…I always knew there was some work in me. I could see the hazy horizon up ahead: it was just a matter of keep tracking it until I got there.’ More of his searingly precise prose and wit is collected together in his second book, In This Block There Lives a Slag, a sharp, clever collection of thirteen short stories set around a residential block. Featuring characters such as Maltese Eddie (‘shy of the middle fingers of his left hand, he’d said that they’d frozen to the rail on the Murmansk convoys but, another time, that they’d paid off a Yakuza debt’) and a Swaledale ram-wrestling academic, these startlingly original Bradford fables give Yorkshire a new dimension.

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