The Swimmers

Longlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards 2021 The outcast in a family of former competitive swimmers must prepare for the end of her mother's life in this sharp, sparkling debut from a bold New Zealand talent.

'Tackles the subject of assisted dying with wit and pathos' The Independent

'Darkly funny, desperately sad, brilliantly written. I absolutely loved it' Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground

When an affair ends badly and takes her career down with it, 26-year-old Erin leaves Auckland to spend the holiday weekend with her aunt, uncle, and terminally ill mother at their suburban family home. On arrival she learns that her mother has decided to take matters into her own hands and end her life - the following Tuesday.

Tasked with fulfilling her mother's final wishes, Erin can only do her imperfect best to navigate difficult feelings, an eccentric neighbourhood, and her complicated family of former competitive swimmers. She must summon the strength she would normally find in the water as she prepares for the loss of the fiery, independent woman who raised her alone, and one last swim together in the cold New Zealand Sea.

Vorwort
• Galleys available for booksellers, press, media and influencers – both digital and physical.  • Broad campaign for coverage in paperback slots for newspapers and magazines in the UK and USA such as The Guardian and Washington Post. 

• Targeted campaign for coverage in paperback slots for relevant publications and online outlets: Breathe Magazine, Calm Magazine, InStyle, Womankind, NB Magazine, Bookanista and Strong Words Magazine. 

• Targeted promotion in Florida where Chloe Lane wrote The Swimmers while completing an MFA. She is supported by authors David Leavitt and Jill Ciment who both live in Florida. 

• Entry into relevant awards including Women’s Prize for Fiction, Comedy Women in Print.

• Campaign across social media including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and blogs. Working with influencers to promote, hosting giveaways and sharing reviews. 

• Audiobook planned. 

• Promotion through author website (chloevlane.com), Gallic Books website (belgraviabooks.com), and newsletters.

Autorentext

Chloe Lane is a writer and the founding editor of Hue+Cry Press. The Swimmers is her first novel and was longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards 2021. She lives in Christchurch, New Zealand with her husband and young son.

Leseprobe
Carrying my bags, I trailed Aunty Wynn out of the kitchen and into the hallway, following the bottom stroke of the hallway’s backwards L shape. When I entered the small room to the left I was struck by the shelves crammed with hundreds of dolphins of varying sizes and colours and made out of wood, ceramic, glass, crystal, plastic, shells, and were those pine cones? The curtains had been drawn so the only decent light was a low-watt ceiling bulb and the faint glow of my mother’s iPad, as she sat diminished and propped up in a loaned hospital bed. To her right there was a metal frame, which her feeding bag come mealtime could be suspended from. The dolphins didn’t cheer things up.  ‘Here she is,’ Aunty Wynn said commandingly from the end of the bed. 

As I emerged from behind Aunty Wynn, my mother let out a shrivelled-up cry. I could tell she was laughing but the sound she made wasn’t my mother’s laugh. It frightened me.

‘Doesn’t she look good?’ Aunty Wynn said.

I’d expected her to look worse somehow. I think I’d expected Aunty Wynn to have her dressed in some kind of old lady’s nightgown, maybe an off-white flannel with tiny pale pink flowers on it. Instead, my mother was wearing a loud seventies-style yellow and green frock with capped sleeves. I’d never seen that frock before. I couldn’t remember the last time my mother had worn a frock for any occasion. A string of large yellow beads hung around her neck. 

My mother was pointing at her hair and nodding at me. I’d dyed my hair a few days before and, while the box had described the dye as ‘darkest intense auburn’, the result was more of a pink grapefruit. When I emailed my mother a photo she had responded: OH NO MY DAUGHTER HAS JOINED A CULT WHERE THEY WEAR WATERMELON HATS. Her comment didn’t really make sense, but it had deflated me. She could still be blunt—her illness hadn’t changed her that much. 

Mere minutes before he dumped me, Karl had said—his voice dry with lust, his lips brushing my neck—that I looked like the girl from The Fifth Element. Remembering this now, a confused shiver of pleasure and anxiety zipped along my spine. I combed at my hair with my fingers. ‘It looks dumb, doesn’t it?’ 

My mother leaned back into her pillow and shook her head weakly. She did look frailer than she had the last time I’d seen her.

‘Your hair?’ Aunty Wynn said to me. Then turning back to my mother: ‘It’s very bold, isn’t it, Helen?’ 

My mother didn’t respond, which was exactly how I expected her to treat her sister. She had given her that cold shoulder my whole life. I felt secure knowing that much hadn’t changed, that my mother and I were still allies. I placed my bags on the floor and sat on the edge of her bed. The high metal frame creaked. With one weak hand she turned her iPad towards me. This was how she communicated all the time now—the screen full of giant uppercase text. 

SOS I CAN’T SPEND ANOTHER MOMENT WITH THESE FUCKING DOLPHINS 

I knew how long it would have taken my mother to type that message. She used Word because she didn’t like the text programmes that were ‘too pushy with their corrections’. I pictured her hands gliding slowly and awkwardly over the screen, woodpecking out each letter, deleting the unintentional typos, the slipping of her fingers, typing it again. I loved that this was the most urgent thing she wanted to share with me in that moment, and it meant even more because of the effort involved. 

I glanced at Aunty Wynn, who was still hovering at the end of the bed, the shelves behind her crammed with ugly dolphins. She pushed the bridge of her glasses up her nose with one soft index finger and smiled, as if she were in on the joke. ‘I’ll leave you ladies to catch up,’ she said. Then she left the room. 

‘Do you want me to smash them?’ I asked jokingly, holding fast to the knowledge that my mother and I were a team. 

She attempted a smile. When I sat this close to her, the difficulty with which she moved her limbs, the fact she could no longer talk, and the slackness of her face all faded into the periphery, and I saw that my whole hilarious and sharp-tongued mother was still there. There was no glazing over of her eyes. She held my gaze the same way she had for the previous twenty-six years of my life: confidently, questioning, and ready to laugh. I hadn’t realised how much I’d missed her. 
But something had changed since I’d seen her last. 

When she was eighteen my mother had gone to university in Wellington, then lived in London for a stint before returning to Wellington where she had worked at the National Library since the early nineties, after I was born. Her life didn’t seem that remarkable to me, but she had told me more than once that the reason she had never been close to her brother and sister was because they had never forgiven her for moving so far away—for having a life that was different from theirs. When I’d asked what had stopped Aunty Wynn and Uncle Cliff from leaving the family…