Confessions of the Ageing Swimmers

Description

About the book

Confessions of the Ageing Swimmers follows Leo, an eighteen-year-old trainee lifeguard navigating his first serious encounter with the world of work.

Marked by the Covid-19 pandemic, political disillusionment, and the climate crisis, Leo belongs to a generation that has learned to manage anxiety before learning to hope. His job at the local leisure centre offers structure and routine, but also exposes him to the contradictions of contemporary employment: responsibility without authority, care without guidance, and constant surveillance wrapped in motivational language.

Swimming, work and belief

The swimming pool in this novel is more than a workplace. It is a public institution where bodies are regulated, behaviour is monitored, and older forms of communal belief quietly resurface in secular form.

As Leo overhears conversations and observes the regular swimmers — including Bartók, an Irish endurance swimmer whose presence in the pool is relentless and unexplained — the novel draws subtle connections between swimming, confession, purification, and salvation.

A sudden and disturbing incident in the changing cubicles becomes a turning point, tempting Leo with the dangerous idea that care might become calling, and exhaustion might become purpose.

Part Two: Christmas Shopping

The second half of the book is a seven-part poem set on Christmas Eve.

Conceived as a secular nativity, Christmas Shopping introduces a cast of improbable witnesses and asks why, in modern Britain, swimming pools have replaced churches as sites of ritual, discipline, and hope.

The poem is imagined as a polyptych and may eventually be developed into a stained-glass installation in collaboration with illustrator Paul Warren.

Who this book is for

This book will appeal to readers interested in:

• work and precarity

• generational anxiety

• institutions and care

• contemporary fiction with ethical depth

• the quiet aftermath of belief

No interest in swimming is required.