If anything, Swimming Lessons is an even more complex puzzle box of a book, excavating darkly knotted family secrets, intricately cruel betrayals and layers of ambiguous loss. “As in her gorgeously harrowing Our Endless Numbered Days, Claire Fuller returns to the territory of a mother’s disappearance and a father’s lies with bewitching and page-turning results. … All of this helps to create a rhythm that gathers speed in the course of the novel making it a gripping read.” Added to this is Fuller′s gift for synaesthetic description: people smell of colours, colours carry emotions.

“With admirable economy Claire Fuller intertwines the two strands, the tone remaining controlled, cool, even casual, throughout which helps to further intensify the surging emotions. It’s her beautiful prose, though, that rounds this one out, as she delves deeply to examine the legacies of a flawed and passionate marriage.”įrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 2017 “As she did in her first novel, Our Endless Numbered Days (2015), Fuller proves to be a master of temporal space, taking readers through flashbacks and epistolary chapters at a pace timed to create wonder and suspense. “ has all the observational touches that show Fuller to be a serious novelist with an acute awareness of the nuances and patterns of human speech and behaviour.” Louise Doughty. “ Swimming Lessons reveals a writer whose craft has been further honed and developed since her debut.” Read more. The Observer, February 2017 (published online in The Guardian) Descriptions are sharp and often amusing (“meaty legs” are so large that if someone had pricked them “they would have spat grease”) and being in labour is to be under the sea “tossed upside down and dragged along the bottom”. Chapters much like waves, rise in climax before falling in understated denouement, a technique that propels what could have been a ponderous narrative to an increasingly pacey end. A deeply moving read, that keeps you turning pages.” Read more.

“Ingrid is a brave but floundering heroine, who puts down “all the things been able to say in person” in her letters, resulting in a portrait so intimate, you feel as if you’ve read a novel written on the secret walls of her very mind. “…Swimming Lessons more than matches the power and skill of Fuller’s debut”

Swimming Lessons by Claire Fuller