Swimming

If Jane Bowles and Gerard Manley Hopkins had a lovechild, she might just possibly write as gloriously as Nicola Keegan. Swimming is a novel for people who love donut holes, or the dead, or dogs, or nuns, or fat people, or world class athletes, or the English language, or pretty much anything. It should be read, re-read, dreamed about, quoted to friends, and enacted as a shimmery odd hilarious mystery play. Swimming is simply magnificent.

Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances

Nicola Keegan's prose is filled with inventive riffs to draw out the poignant turbulences of her heroine, both in the water and out. Reading the book becomes itself like a long, sinuous surge through the pool...Keegan stitches all of this adeptly to deliver a classy fiction about the tenuous relationship of worldly success to the intimate self

Peter Carty, Independent

A significant, dazzling debut

Kate Saunders, The Times

Beautifully written ... An ultimately joyful book about surviving emotional trauma, Swimming is also a remarkable portrait of the self-absorption and sacrifice needed to win gold

Adrian Turpin, Financial Times

Keegan's vivid, splashy prose and off-the-wall humour suit the story of the harrowing traumas of an adolescence...Swimming's, moving, exhilarating story of love, sport, triumph and loss is pretty much a winner

Tina Jackson, Metro

Keegan's shimmering, fluid prose is outwardly playful, yet this is a seriously well-crafted novel

Catherine Taylor, Guardian

Told with wry, understated compassion, this engrossing novel ponders the challenges of growing up gifted

Hephzibah Anderson, Daily Mail

[A] ravishing first novel...gorgeous

New York Times

Written with verve and bursts of wild humour', 'It's an enlightening plunge into a world that we all come to know more about soon

Emma Hagestadt, Independent