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The Night Swimmers (Hardcover)

By Peter Rock

$25.00

ISBN: 9781641290005

Availability: On Our Shelves Now

Published: Soho Press - March 12th, 2019

As fluid and elusive as the watery world in which the protagonist is so often submerged, Rock’s latest is, like all his work, dreamlike, fragmented, unpredictable. A young man still dependent on his parents is spending a summer with them in a lake community on the shores of Lake Michigan. He’s trying to write but is essentially unmoored. Swimming almost nightly, he’s aware in a dreamlike way of what goes on in the lake’s shadowy depths, its currents, crosscurrents, undercurrents, just as he is subliminally aware of the unseen forces that have driven his own past. Then he encounters another swimmer, a widow a decade older who is as mysterious as the watery depths above which they stroke in tandem. All of this moves back and forth with a present 20 years later when the narrator/author, now a husband and father, parents his two daughters with love and imagination. I’ve never read a better account of a young man adrift in a world still unchartered in his mind. I found it spellbinding and brilliantly illuminating.