11/14/2016
"Fuller has written a profound portrait of marriage, motherhood, and loss. It is a beautiful, devastating book."
Powell's Pick of the Month
"A tantalizing mystery."
"A deeply moving read, with a mystery that keeps you turning pages."
"I loved it and was caught up in it so thoroughly that it was my companion during every meal I ate until I finished the book. I have also never felt so inclined to leave marginalia in a book as I did after reading Swimming Lessons ."
"Extraordinarily smart and psychologically shrewd . . . You will be kept guessing until the final penetrating sentence."
"Like Fuller’s stunning debut, Swimming Lessons is a story suffused with the poignancy of miscommunication between people who love each other, of the things we can never really know."
"Swimming Lessons continues Claire Fuller’s mastery of beautiful language and heartbreaking imagery, which lays bare the stories of infidelities, lies, revivals of love and then demise of those loves. The women of this novel fight for their very souls, and their stories unfurl like flags of independence appearing in to wave from her landscape of great books and art and hope."
"A perfect book club pick."
"In Swimming Lessons , Fuller explores the all too familiar pull of duty, expectation, and guilt between a family in emotional turmoil with an unsentimental eye, recalling some of the best work of the late, great Richard Yates. Fuller's debut novel, Our Endless Numbered Days , was nothing short of brilliant and I'm here to tell you that she has officially avoided a sophomore slump with this gem of a book."
"I could not put Swimming Lessons down and read it in one sitting! It lingered in my thoughts long after I finished. Marvelous! A must read!"
"Claire Fuller has captured love in its fullest form, nursed on betrayal and regret and guilt. Gil cheats on and abandons his wife too many times, until she disappears, leaving her clothing on the beach, and he can't know even if she's still alive. She leaves only letters, hidden in a great library of books, and he'll search for her until his end. Swimming Lessons is so smoothly, beautifully written, and the human failures here are heartbreaking. "
"Beautiful . . . [Fuller] delves deeply to examine the legacies of a flawed and passionate marriage."
"With Swimming Lessons , Claire Fuller confirms her place as a writer of exceptional insight and warmth. This tale of a marriage, of a family, and especially of children bearing the brunt of the fallout of betrayals and abandonment, pulls you in and refuses to let you emerge from the lives of its characters until the tale is finally told. Even then it takes time to shake the spell the book creates."
"Claire Fuller’s newest book is a kind of love letter to the complicated relationships that are part of the real world rather than the romantic fiction we build in our minds."
"Ingrid is a brave but floundering heroine who puts down "all the things [she hasn't] been able to say in person" in her letters, resulting in a portrait so intimate, you feel as if you've read a novel written on the secret walls of her very mind. A deeply moving read, with a mystery that keeps you turning pages. "
"Swimming Lessons hovers in the electric space between secrets and connection, between the desire to love and urge to hide. This is a biting, soaring novel."
"Claire Fuller is a master of the psychological mystery. In her most recent novel, Swimming Lessons, no one is running around with a gun and no physical violence occurs. And yet damage happens. Families are cut to the bone. And lingering wounds are left festering into adulthood. . . . It's a deliciously written story within a story that isn't over until the last page has been turned."
"Delicious! Claire Fuller's Swimming Lessons is a kind of anti-cozy cozy mystery."
"Claire Fuller’s Swimming Lessons is a beautifully told literary mystery that weaves together the lives and loves of people defined by deceit and a questionable disappearance. "
"A 'choose your own adventure’ story for adults . . . A haunting, motivating, and fantastic read."
"Claire Fuller's acrobatic new novel, about a family who has failed each other, inverts our expectations of narrative time to an astonishing effect: our experience of grasping for truth about those who have left is just as pained and urgent as her characters'. Fuller's sentences are condensed maps of the human process, unfolding in patterns we immediately recognize."
10/01/2016
