#BookReview ‘The Swimming Pool’ by Louise Candlish

About the book…

I can’t take my eyes off the water. Can you?’

It’s summer when Elm Hill lido opens, having stood empty for years. For Natalie Steele – wife, mother, teacher – it offers freedom from the tightly controlled routines of work and family. Especially when it leads her to Lara Channing, a charismatic former actress with a lavish bohemian lifestyle, who seems all too happy to invite Natalie into her elite circle.

Soon Natalie is spending long days at the pool, socializing with new friends and basking in a popularity she didn’t know she’d been missing. Real life, and the person she used to be, begins to feel very far away.

But is such a change in fortunes too good to be true? Why are dark memories of a summer long ago now threatening to surface? And, without realizing, could Natalie have been swept dangerously out of her depth?

My thanks to publishers Michael J Books for approving my request to read ‘The Swimming Pool’ which is available in e-book, paperback, and audiobook formats.

Wow. This is the perfect summer read, taking place over the summer holidays where a teacher becomes enamoured of a more upwardly mobile social group with devastating consequences.
Natalie, her husband Ed, and teen daughter Molly all live in a flat in Elm Hill, both adults are teachers and, to supplement their income, Ed plans on taking tutoring lessons over the holiday.
Natalie lives a very rigid and ordered life, the narration is from her perspective as she quite happily sneers over the re-opening of the local lido, by sometime celeb, Lara.

She has lived in the posher part of Elm Hill for the past 2 years without crossing paths, and Nat’s seemingly erratic reaction to the publicity that Lara, and teen daughter ,Georgia,are getting, pre-empts a female friendship unlike any others she has known.

The difficulty is, since toddlerhood, Molly has been terrified of water.

The unbelievably helpful and glamorous Lara loves that Nat doesn’t try and suck up to her , and offers to help with hypnotherapy to shake Molly from the grasp of her phobia.
The swims at the lido become more frequent, and spill over into the real world where Ed begins to tutor Georgia and she and Molly become tentative friends.
The friendship groups develop in a haze of alcohol fuelled parties, sunshine, swimming and louche behaviour which Ed thoroughly disapproves of.

But, having lived so rigidly by the rules, can Nat step outside her comfort zone without the terrible child that she was rearing it’s ugly head?
And who , exactly , is going to pay the price for her deep dark secrets?
What I loved about this novel is the interplay between the beginning of the holiday when the sun filled weeks stretched ahead with endless possibility, versus the last day of August, Nat’s birthday, and as yet unidentified tragedy which occurs.

As you peel back the layers of Nat’s life and her sense of order with Ed, combatting with her bohemian sessions with Lara, you find yourself alternating between willing Nat on, and also deriding her for being a bit selfish.

But is that the fault of society for being so insistent on women of a certain age ‘staying in their lane’?

Why shouldn’t she reach out beyond her small circle, and best friend Gayle who joins her in mocking what they refer to as ‘The Noblesse’?

It shows, to me, just how women can be trapped by the expectations on them from certain quarters and how, no matter how hard you try, just like the swimming pool, life may look calm on the surface, but the weight of the water has the power to crush you.

A 5 star summer read in this reader’s humble opinion!

About the author…

”Hello! I’m the author of 14 novels, including my latest release ‘The Other Passenger’, a dark thriller about envy and deception set on the Thames river buses. It is a Richard & Judy Book Club pick and has been longlisted for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2021.

‘Our House’, a #1 bestseller in paperback, ebook and audio and won the British Book Awards 2019 Book of the Year – Crime & Thriller and will soon be on our screens as a major ITV series made by Red Planet Pictures.

Before writing fiction, I studied English at University College London and worked as an illustrated book editor and advertising copywriter.

I live in a South London neighbourhood not unlike the one in my novels with my husband, teenage daughter, and our fox-red Labrador Bertie.”