Swimming Lessons

Ingrid Coleman is unhappy with the life she has built, and she turns to the one outlet she trusts: letters to her husband, Gil, setting down what their intense, difficult marriage was really like. She never gives him the letters. Instead she tucks them into the thousands of books Gil has gathered over the years. Then, one day, she vanishes from a beach in Dorset, leaving behind a crumbling seaside house, her husband and their two small daughters, Flora and Nan.

Twelve years on, Gil is older and his mind is not what it was. Standing at a bookshop window, he believes he glimpses Ingrid in the street, but everyone around him puts it down to confusion. Flora has never accepted that her mother drowned. She comes home to look after her father and, at the same time, to look into what happened to Ingrid.

What Flora cannot yet know is that her answers are close at hand, folded between the pages of the books crowding the house. As she searches, the story moves between past and present and opens up the Colemans' marriage, laying bare its secrets, its passion and its damage. Claire Fuller's novel is sharp, unsettling and full of surprises, a family mystery in which the clues are written by the missing woman herself.