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Swimming Lessons

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Swimming Lessons

By: Claire Fuller
Narrated by: Rachel Atkins
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Ingrid Coleman writes letters to her husband, Gil, about the truth of their marriage, but instead of giving them to him, she hides each in the thousands of books he has collected over the years. When Ingrid has written her final letter, she disappears from a Dorset beach, leaving behind her beautiful but dilapidated house by the sea, her husband, and her two daughters, Flora and Nan.

Twelve years after her disappearance, Gil thinks he sees Ingrid from a bookshop window, but he's getting older, and this unlikely sighting is chalked up to senility. Flora, who has never believed her mother drowned, returns home to care for her father and to try to finally discover what happened to Ingrid. But what Flora doesn't realize is that the answers to her questions are hidden in the books that surround her. Sexy and whip-smart, Swimming Lessons holds the Coleman family up to the light, exposing the mysterious and complicated truths of a passionate and troubled marriage.

©2017 Claire Fuller (P)2016 Audible, Ltd Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Mystery Marriage Swimming
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Claire Fuller's slightly mystical, beautifully written first novel was Our Endless Numbered Days which I highly recommended on my Audible review page on 27/7/2015. Her second novel Swimming Lessons fulfils all the promise of her first - I loved it.

The structure is carefully contrived but is seamless to read or listen to as we're taken backwards and forwards in time. Ingrid is a university student who falls for her slightly predatory far older tutor Gil Coleman and when she finds she's pregnant, they marry. Ingrid is not allowed to take her Finals and Gil loses his job and becomes a full time writer, although in fact he spends more time philandering and very little writing anything beyond one successful (and ultimately destructive) book. Ingrid struggles with children and miscarriages, the pain of which is exquisitely described. She has always been happiest in the water, and one day she leaves her clothes on the beach and disappears.

The other layer of the story is Gil as a broken old man, irascible and selfish in his house stacked with thousands of books, with his two very different grown-up daughters Flora and Nan around him. Their memories of their missing mother and their present day lives haunted by her disappearance form a strand of the narrative, but the core is made up of the letters which Ingrid wrote to Gil as her passionate marriage fell apart and which she doesn't give to him, but slips inside random books on his overflowing shelves.

Like her previous novel, there is a light touch of fairy tale which transports the listener, but at the same time it's firmly rooted in real life and the idiosyncrasies, complexities, pain and pleasures of relationships. The rhythm of the story is like the sea which is so important to the whole story, ebbing, flowing, constantly moving. The themes of betrayal, regret, guilt, loss, absence, isolation are all worked through with a gentle delicacy, the language always imaginative and fresh. There are some mysteries which are never solved, and some solutions are dispersed through the story like beads on a necklace. The narrator Rachel Atkins does a great job and adds another dimension to the novel - the dialogue is particularly skilfully presented.

Don't miss this one, and look out for Claire Fuller's third one!

Beautifully beguiling - don't miss it!

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This book was read brilliantly. The reader captured the characters well.

The story was good too, though the topic took me a while to get into. The author keeps you hanging right until the end.

Beautifully constructed work

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Enjoyable book overall and I wanted to keep listening to it to find out what had happened to one of the main characters. It would be a good book to take on holiday, not too heavy but not too lightweight either. I'm not a great fan of romance novels but there was just enough to keep me interested. My only criticism would be that the narrator gave a couple of the characters some strange voices, i.e. a woman in her twenties sounded like a very young child and the men sounded a bit creepy at times. However, I could easily overlook this because the story was enjoyable. Would definitely recommend.

Swimming Lessons

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Not a bad story at all, although I liked the idea/concept of the story better than the actual story itself if that makes sense. Nonetheless, it was an interesting listen, and I enjoyed it all the way through.

Not bad...

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I feel like this book the characters and story draw you in they stay with you even when your not listening. A sad tale of a silly man and a woman who wanted him to be what he wasn’t. I really enjoyed the descriptions of the where they were and the honestly of an imperfect marriage.

A book that involves you...

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