The Swimmers

Here comes the new Julie Otsuka novel, so we can begin to live again

Colson Whitehead, author of Harlem Shuffle

Heartbreaking and astoundingly good

Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers

Stylistically ambitious and deeply moving

Kirkus Reviews

A goddamn heartbreaker

Emma Straub, author of The Vacationers

An unforgettable novel about mothers and daughters by a spellbinding talent

Daily Mail

A story of memory loss and its fallout for family, and of the power of pool friendship. Glittering and tender.

Sainsbury's Magazine

As a regular and sedate swimmer, I loved this novel...A quiet and thoughtful story about the small, steady joys of life and how quickly and irrevocably they can become disrupted.

Red Magazine

A story about mothers and daughters, love and loss, it will make you reconsider what's truly important in life

Kintsugi Magazine

Haunting, ironic and poetic in its resonance, this slender volume is a must-read...Don't miss this beautifully written, heartfelt, wry and wistful exploration of loss.

Woman & Home

"The Swimmers" is an exquisite companion. Though it doesn't answer the unanswerable, the novel's quiet insistence resonates: that it is our perfectly ordinary proclivities that make us who we are.

New York Times

I'm in awe of how this beautiful, graceful novel can hold so much grief and loss and love in its pages: a literary gem.

Nicci Gerard, author of Soham: A Story Of Our Times

Haunting, ironic and poetic in its resonance, this slender volume is a must-read

Woman's Weekly

With shrewd characterisation and original observations, Otsuka tells a tale of grief and memory that's quietly observed yet awash with dark humour and wit.

Spectator

What makes a good life? What is a good death? The answers to these questions shimmer elusively just below the surface of The Swimmers

Stylist

Amid an incantatory litany of totalising losses, there are snapshots of a unique life with all its complications. Superbly realised and incredibly moving

Daily Mail

Otsuka's slender, stylistically ambitious third novel is a marvel, capturing the hypnotic rhythm of lane-swimming and the devastating decline of memory and connection as dementia takes hold...Heartbreakingly powerful

Mail on Sunday, Best New Fiction

Her wisdom is staggeringly beautiful, implicating each of us

The Irish Times

Poignant and funny, I've never read such a brilliant account of this devastating illness, nor for that matter of the compulsive nature of swimming lengths in a pool.

Collagerie

'If it wasn't tragedy it would be comedy, and it nimbly treads the very narrow line between'

The Tablet

'One of the marvels of The Swimmers is its unshowy portrayal of the immense drama inherent in losing the mind before the body has expired. But perhaps even more impressive is its respect for the general confusion of living'

Financial Times