Swim Until You Can't See Land - Hardcover

Swim Until You Can't See Land charts the relationship between two women born sixty years apart, whose chance encounter marks a watershed for the younger woman. In her early twenties, Hannah Wright is forced to give up a promising career as a professional swimmer, and is adjusting with difficulty to her narrowed horizons. She is in danger of becoming embittered, haunted by a lost future. Mariele may now be frail and old, but as her exploits during WW2 unfold, she is revealed as a woman of extraordinary spirit, unbroken by capture and interrogation as an agent in occupied France. Hannah's delight in the medium of water and the rhythms of swimming are set in dramatic counterpoint to Mariele's of torture by water, an ordeal that puts her in touch with her core strength - something Hannah starts to discover in herself.

CATRIONA CHILD was born in 1980 in Dundee and spent a great deal of her youth ploughing up and down swimming pools. She has a degree in English from the University of Aberdeen and an MA with distinction in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. She won the Sunday Herald Blog competition in 2007, was shortlisted for the National Library of Scotland/The Scotsman Crime short story competition in 2008 and was published in the Scottish Book Trust Family Legends anthology and the magazine Northwords Now. She has worked as a postie, in a cinema, in a music shop and even had a very short-lived spell selling knickers on a market stall. She lives in Edinburgh with her husband Allan and their fish Speckled Jim.