The Night Swimmer

Matt Bondurant's novel The Wettest County in the World was a New York Times Editor's Pick, one of the San Francisco Chronicle 's 50 Best Books of the Year, and is being made into a major motion picture. Now, Bondurant has delivered The Night Swimmer, an atmospheric tale infused with Hitchcockian suspense. When Fred and Elly Bulkington arrive in a small town on the southern coast of Ireland from Vermont, having won a pub in a contest, they encounter a wild, strange land and the native resistance to outsiders. As Fred immerses himself in the life of a pub-owner, Elly takes the ferry out to a nearby island where she-to the disbelief of the locals-is consumed by her ritual of open water ocean swimming, pushing herself to the limits. Elly becomes enmeshed in the island's troubles-the power struggles between an enigmatic goat herder and the family that has controlled the area for centuries-while Fred's sanity wavers and their marriage begins to unravel. Filled with lush imagery of the Irish coast, crashing sea, rolling hills, and rich Irish lore, The Night Swimmer is a stunning novel that exposes the dark and unseen crevasses in the human heart.