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Soho Press
March 2019
On Sale: March 12, 2019
272 pages
ISBN: 1641290005
EAN: 9781641290005
Kindle: B07D6B1BXY
Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction
“Swimming at night, to compare its slipperiness to that
of a dream would be to ignore the work of staying afloat,
the mesmerism brought on by the rhythm, the repetition of
the strokes.” Beneath the surface of Lake Michigan there are vast
systems: crosscutting currents, sudden drop-offs, depths
of absolute darkness, shipwrecked bodies, hidden places.
Peter Rock’s stunning autobiographical novel begins in
the ’90s on the Door Peninsula of Wisconsin. The
narrator, a recent college graduate, and a young widow,
Mrs. Abel, swim together at night, making their way
across miles of open water, navigating the currents and
swells and carried by the rise and fall of the lake. The
nature of these night swims, and of his relationship to
Mrs. Abel, becomes increasingly mysterious to the
narrator as the summer passes, until the night that Mrs.
Abel disappears. Twenty years later, the narrator—now married with two
daughters—tries to understand those months, his forgotten
obsessions and dreams. Digging into old notebooks and
letters, as well as clippings he’s preserved on the
“psychic photography” of Ted Serios and scribbled
quotations from Rilke and Chekhov, the narrator rebuilds
a world he’s lost. He also looks for clues to the fate of
Mrs. Abel, and begins once again to swim distances in
dark water.
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