LONGLIST, JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION, 2021 OCKHAM NZ BOOK AWARDS
‘Tackles the subject of assisted dying with wit and pathos’ —The Independent
‘Lane’s unsentimental prose nails the strange enormity and mundanity of love and death with perfect piquancy’ —Daily Mail
‘A powerful and intense debut’ —The Sun
‘Darkly funny, desperately sad, brilliantly written. I absolutely loved it’ —Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground
‘This book is spectacular. A perfect blend of devastating humour and sadness’ —Emily Austin, author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday be Dead
‘The Swimmers is by turns touching, resonate, fiercely candid, and beautifully written. In this novel about a daughter’s attempt to help her mother receive a merciful death, Lane has sidestepped the clichés, and captured the enigma of what it means to save a life by ending one’ —Jill Ciment, author of The Body in Question
‘Tragic, warm and darkly funny, The Swimmers left me breathless with sorrow yet also strangely hopeful. Lane’s prose is compelling and her insights into what makes us human are full of wisdom’ —Hannah Persaud, author of The Codes of Love
‘A beautiful, heart rending and totally absorbing narrative, a compulsive page turner from start to end. This account of a mother and daughter’s last days together, defining their love for each other, even as language has literally deserted Erin’s mother, and rendered Erin inarticulate in the face of inevitable loss, made me weep in places. And yet, Chloe Lane offers gifts of laughter, turning a mood from intensity to outright and sometimes outrageous comedy with quick and subtle shifts of tone. I wish I had written this novel; it’s a little masterpiece’ —Fiona Kidman, author of This Mortal Boy
A tender portrait of indestructible family bonds and unrepentant, rule-breaking independence’ —Bookanista
‘The Swimmers has the kind of intelligent and beautiful quiet that explodes a brightness deep within the reader … I can't remember the last time I read a more generous book about care, courage and figuring it out’ —Pip Adam, author of Nothing to See
‘The Swimmers is an intense, moving and darkly comic story about unrepentant, difficult women’ —Paula Morris, NZ Herald
‘Lane is a master of comic writing. Many scenes in her debut novel The Swimmers are pushed to within a breath of their absurd limit’ —Annaleese Jochems, author of Baby.
Read Lane’s 2022 interview with Bookanista here
Listen to Lane discuss The Swimmers with Lynn Freeman on Radio NZ here
Read Lane’s 2020 essay on the moral dilemma of writing a novel about assisted dying here
Cover painting: Peachthief, 2019, oil and acrylic on linen, 1000x900mm, by Nicola Farquhar