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What a captivating, but also completely devastating novel THE SWIMMERS by Julie Otsuka is. It starts out among the community of swimmers at a local pool, and she’s brilliant on all the little details of what regular swimmers at pools are like, the unspoken rules, the lane discipline, the envy of people who can do flip turns.

‘The shock of the water - there’s nothing like it on land. The cool clear liquid flowing over every inch of your skin. THe temporary reprieve from gravity. The miracle of your own buoyancy as you glide, unhindered, across the glossy blue surface of the pool. It’s just like flying. The pure pleasure of being in motion. The dissipation of all want. I’m free… and if you swim for long enough you no longer know where your own body ends and the water begins and there is no boundary between you and the world. It’s nirvana.’

The first half is written in the first person plural. The swimmers are disturbed one day by a hairline crack that appears at the bottom of their beautiful pool. Evidence of some engineering fault? Some geological tremor? A figment of their own imaginations? No one can explain it and the crack will lead to a disruption of the swimmers’ orderly world. And then you realise what the novel is really about, has been all along, as the focus moves to one of the swimmers, Alice, who suffers from dementia. It becomes her story, and that of her daughter.

I wonder if it’s better not to know anything about this novel before reading it? I certainly wouldn’t have picked it up, as ageing and dementia are not generally subjects I like to dwell on. And yet, I so loved the first half that Otsuka effectively entranced me into reading the rest. I’m so glad I did. A sad but incredibly beautiful novel that I know will resonate with me for a long time, perhaps forever.

Have you read it? What did you think?

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Funny how books bubble up sometimes. A week ago I had never heard of THE SHORT END OF THE SONNENALLEE and then a Patreon subscriber (source of all my best tips - please join and then you too can influence me) flagged it up. As we’d been planning a pod travel special (I’m still not over the end of summer) I duly ordered a copy and then two other readers whose taste I trust also mentioned it approvingly.

It’s a short, endearing novel set in East Berlin among the community who live at one particular point on the Sonnenallee - most of which is in the West, but Churchill apparently decided to let Stalin have 60m of it, and so the residents live above the Wall, tantalised by the freedom they can see but never experience.

I’ve seen and read various things about how awful life was under a totalitarian state (from The Lives of Others to Lea Ypi’s wonderful memoir about growing up in Albania) but I’ve never read a light comedy about it. Hints at darkness abound but in the main this is a novel that celebrates the ability humans have to look on the bright side and make the best of a bad deal. Micha, a lovelorn teenager, is at the novel’s heart, but also his friends and relations who make up an idiosyncratic cast of characters. Will Mischa ever persuade Miriam, the most beautiful girl in the GDR to take him seriously? You’ll have to read it and see - I recommend that you do. Also if you thought Jonathan Franzen was only interested in birds these days you’d be wrong - turns out, with Professor Jenny Watson, he’s been translating, and it’s him we should thank that this funny, winningly readable, original and relevant novel is now available for us English-speakers to enjoy.

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After a dream weekend in Provence in the sparkling company of @the_litedit @janegreenauthor, an eminent philosopher and his dear brother, and a small group of strangers who quickly felt like friends, I am now officially a Daphne du Maurier fan. I’d read Rebecca of course, back in the day, hasn’t everyone? But I’d never ventured into her other works.

The Scapegoat is a doppleganger story, our main character John being tricked into assuming another’s identity. Through a reasonably believable plot contrivance he ends up at his double’s chateau where he is obliged to pretend to be a husband, brother-in-law, father and general seigneur to a colourful cast of characters. Apart from the dog, who isn’t fooled and is nearly his undoing, they accept him as their own. He quickly discovers the various difficulties they are all labouring under - the daughter under the sway of religious fanaticism, the brother-in-law attempting to run a failing glass manufacturers, and while our hero doesn’t exactly roll up his sleeves and get to work, Flora Poste style, his steadfast nature and inner decency start to have their effect.

Du Maurier doesn’t give the reader - who by now is deeply invested in John and his travails - the ending they might want, but she does deliver a richly satisfying conclusion, one that lingers in the mind as do the characters and sense of place.

What surprised me was the writing, so detailed - quite unlike any contemporary novels I can think of - and yet never difficult. Oh the contrary it was all the little details that absorbed me. It’s a book to be savoured, and contains one of the most beautiful descriptons of Autumn I think I’ve ever read (swipe left). A treat. (With the fact that there is apparently a Netflix series starring Matthew Rhys the icing on the cake.)

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