The Swells

by Will Aitken

Overview

In this darkly hilarious satire by the inimitable Will Aitken, class war erupts aboard a luxury cruise ship.

 A boatload of white privilege, The Emerald Tranquility is the most luxurious cruise liner afloat, its passengers some of the richest people in the world. Meanwhile the ship’s crew, overworked and underpaid, live packed tightly together in airless below-deck cabins. The passengers encounter a great number of cataclysms at sea, but no matter the catastrophe, the great ship always sails on.

Briony, a globetrotting luxury travel writer, emulates the rich — though homeless and penniless herself — as she hops from gig to all-expenses-paid gig. On her own personal voyage, she encounters Mrs. Moore, an enigmatic woman of advanced age clandestinely fomenting a mutiny on this bountiful ship.

With the captain overthrown, roles quickly reverse: the crew become the ship’s new leisure class and the aged passengers learn how to mop floors and scrub toilets. Confused and terrified by the resultant chaos, Briony must decide which lot to cast her fate with in this savage satire of the way we live now.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781487009700
Publisher:	House of Anansi Press Inc
Publication date:	01/04/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

WILL AITKEN has written three previous novels — Realia, A Visit Home, and Terre Haute — and the non-fiction books Death in Venice: A Queer Film Classic and Antigone Undone: Juliette Binoche, Anne Carson, Ivo van Hove, and the Art of Resistance, which was shortlisted for the Hilary

Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. He lives in Montreal.

What People are Saying About This

Terry Fallis

In The Swells, Will Aitken’s brilliant new novel, the most luxurious cruise ship on the seas floats right-side up, but the passengers and crew are turned upside down. On board, a class mutiny yields an eviscerating yet hilarious reversal of fortunes and a stinging, darkly veiled satire that left me laughing and thinking long after I turned the last page.

Jordan Tannahill

The Swells is a brilliantly acerbic upstairs-downstairs satire of class and privilege on the high seas. Will Aitken is a singular voice in our literary landscape.

Gary Barwin

Careful not to spill that flute of Veuve Clicquot on your Jimmy Choos as you’re swept away on the waves of this riotous high-seas satire where the 1 percent become the 99. The delectable queer lovechild of Condé Nast Traveller, The Great Gatsby, Karl Marx, and P. G. Wodehouse, The Swells asks if revolution is like rearranging diamonds and deckchairs on the Titanic, if utopia is the worst form of society except for all the others. Strap on your Mae West: this voyage is an archly, artfully, uproariously breezy yet incisive dark delight.

Editorial Reviews

Other than an engaging narration by Eva Kaminsky, THE SWELLS doesn’t live up to its promise as a “darkly hilarious satire.” Its concept is amusing—a luxury liner filled with aging, excessively wealthy passengers experiences a class mutiny mid-ocean. Sadly, the story stretches credibility, and the characters remain merely caricatures. Kaminsky creates the hapless Briony, a travel writer. As the story gets turned on its head, the crew become pampered guests, while the passengers are forced to take on crew duties. Working-class Briony finds herself torn between the one-percenters and the mutinying crew. Kaminsky does her best with the stereotyped characters, but they are one dimensional and hardly believable. Kaminsky’s adept performance saves the audiobook from being a total disappointment. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2022 - AudioFile