What to read to understand swimming

Three books that take a deep dive into the life aquatic

Adrift by Miranda Ward (2021)

The strip-lit, verruca-sock vending machine and diving-board world of swimming pools may not seem like the most obvious setting for a heartbreaking meditation on fertility, femininity and the fallibility of the human body, but in the hands of Miranda Ward, these castles of chlorine become a powerful backdrop for the most raw, poignant and informative books about pregnancy loss I have read. I learned more about the lived reality of miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy and IVF between these lines and lanes than in any novel, not to mention my entire biology GCSE.

Under the Net by Iris Murdoch (1954)

Sometimes a whole novel boils down in your memory to a single scene. For me, Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net is not a book about mid-century relationships, class, sex, gender or education; it is instead solely the story of a drunken night-swim in the Thames. To slip out of the world, unseen, into an inky, silted river that is both ancient and ever-changing is so heady an image, such a brilliant passage of writing, that this remains – in my recollection – entirely a swimming novel, with some other bits scattered around it.

Turning by Jessica J Lee (2017)

Following the separation from her husband in her 20s, the Canadian-British-Taiwanese author – and, like me, a Kenwood Ladies’ Pond swimming devotee – Jessica J Lee embarked on a challenge: to swim in 52 of Berlin’s lakes in a single year. From the near-drinking water turquoise clarity of Sacrower See to the wooded lung that is Krumme Lanke, this book taught me so much about the watery mechanics of freshwater, as the lakes literally “turn over” in autumn and spring; it brought me down to the duck’s eye detail of pond weed and ice; and it made me want to leap on my bike and pedal out into suburbia for an illicit dip with nothing more than a towel in my bag and a warm boiled egg in my pocket.

Brave and Bold by Nell Frizzell will be published on 7 May by Mudlark (£16.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop. Delivery charges may apply

Photography by Gabriele Lopez/Millennium Images