An Irish Times Book of the Year for Sinéad Gleeson

A brilliantly original, meditative memoir, a ‘fusion of cool, clear-eyed prose and watercolours, photographs and portraits’ (Time Out New York), that explores the world of swimming.

Intimate with chlorinated space; weightless yet limited; closed off to taste, sound, and most sight: this is a swimmer’s state. When ten-year-old Leanne Shapton joins a swim team, she finds an affinity for its rhythms – and spends years training, making it to the Olympic trials twice.

Swimming Studies reflects on her time immersed in a world of rigour and determination, routine and competition. Vivid details of a life spent largely underwater emerge: adolescence in suburban Canada, dawn risings for morning practice, bus rides with teammates, a growing collection of swimsuits, dips in lakes and oceans. When she trades athletic pursuits for artistic ones, the metrics of moving through water endure.

In elegant, spare writing, Shapton renders swimming as a mode of experiencing time, movement, and perspective, capable of shaping our lives in every environment. The result is captivating and profound: a modern classic of sport writing and memoir from a singular talent.

‘If there is a more beautifully observed examination of the weightlessness, silence, rigor, and delight of what it means to swim, I’ve never read it.’ David Rakoff

‘Expresses what it’s like to be haunted by the person one used to be, and the search for how that person exists in the present. Leanne Shapton writes with such curiosity, ruefulness, intelligence, and grace.’ Sheila Heti

‘My very favourite book . . . When somebody says, I want a book that’s going to teach me how to write, or how to be an artist – it’s this.’ Ann Patchett

‘Her honed attention to detail gives the reader the sensation of watching a meticulous mind watching itself, down to the hundredth of a second.’ New Yorker

‘Ultimately, Swimming Studies is about more than swimming . . . It’s about how the diligence of athletic practice can translate into art, communication and even love.’ Washington Post

‘‘Brilliant, eccentric and moving – an immersion in a life . . . Shapton has a novelist’s instinct for the nostalgic charge of the inconsequential . . . Her language is as crisp as the autumn day she describes.’ Observer