Deborah Levy - Swimming Home

Deborah Levy discusses her novel Swimming Home with James Naughtie and a group of readers.

Swimming Home was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012 and is about a famous British poet on holiday with family and friends on the French Riviera when an unstable young woman, Kitty Finch, turns up out of the blue. At the beginning of the novel she emerges naked from the villa's swimming pool as the group return from a day trip.

From this moment a tangled web of relationships is pulled apart, testing the characters to the limit and exposing all their anxieties and their fears - with the swimming pool at centre stage of the story.

Kitty is obsessed with the poet Joe, and is determined he should read a long poem of her own, also called Swimming Home. Through the novel, she exposes a crack in the marriage of Joe and Isobel his war correspondent wife, watched on by their 14 year old daughter and the neighbour Madeleine.

Presenter : James Naughtie
Interviewed guest : Deborah Levy
Producer : Dymphna Flynn

August's Bookclub choice : Bel Canto by Ann Patchett (2001).