How’s this for a killer opening line?

“When Kitty Finch took her hand off the steering wheel and told him she loved him, he no longer knew if she was threatening him or having a conversation.”

Set aside an afternoon’s reading time for Deborah Levy’s gripping Swimming Home.*

Swimming Home is the story of poet, Joe, his wife, daughter and friends Mitchell and Laura. The group has rented a villa in the hills above Nice, France for the summer –

“…the nights were always ‘soft’ in the French Riviera. The days were hard and smelt of money.”

However the holiday gets off to a strange start when they discover a girl in the swimming pool. The girl is Kitty Finch, a self-proclaimed botanist with a stutter and green-painted fingernails, walking naked out of the water and into their holiday.

“Standing next to Kitty Finch was like being near a cork that had just popped out of a bottle. The first pop when gasses seem to escape and everything is sprinkled for one second with something intoxicating.” Continue reading →