Description

‘Beautifully written, full of wisdom and wonderful secondary characters. I loved it’ Daily Mail

‘A glowing, generous novel’ Irish Times

‘A warm, unsentimental and beautifully-observed book for our times’ Lucy Caldwell, author of These Days

Grace lives alone in Ballybrady, a little village on the sublimely beautiful east coast of Northern Ireland. She fills her days with swimming, fishing, quilting, and baiting the tourists who arrive from the city with more money than sense. She hasn’t left the village since a traumatic stay in London as a young woman at the end of the 1980s.

One of the tourists is Evan, taking an enforced holiday from his family and work in Belfast after breaking down after the death of his daughter in infancy. He has come to try to process his grief and make himself desirable again as a husband, a father and a business partner.

But he hasn’t been there a week until he gets trapped by lockdown. When Grace saves his life in a kayaking accident – if it was an accident – and Evan’s troubled son arrives to stay, all three are drawn together in a way that forces a reckoning with their personal traumas and draws them back into society.

This is a moving and funny debut novel set in a quirky coastal community you will be desperate to visit after reading. It will appeal to readers of Elizabeth Strout, Maggie O’Farrell and Alice Munro.

Publisher Review

Grumpy, irascible, sharp-tongued but huge-hearted, utterly at home in her skin, Grace is a force of nature – it’s impossible not to be swept up in admiration for her, and for Roisin Maguire, who has written such a warm, unsentimental and beautifully-observed book for our times — Lucy Caldwell, author of These Days If I were in bother I’d want the Ballybrady bunch at my back. This is a truly heart-warming story of loss, recovery and above all, of community. Irreverent, unexpected, at times laugh-out-loud funny, it’s a joy of a read — Bernie McGill, author of The Watch House Exquisitely written, teeming with wonderfully relatable characters and sporting a gloriously eccentric, cranky and memorable 50-year-old heroine, Night Swimmers is one of the most emotionally intelligent novels I’ve read in a long time — Dr Sharon Blackie, author of The Enchanted Life Night Swimmers is superb: a tough, wise, redemptive novel from a writer who knows the perils of the Irish Sea as well as those of the human heart — Sam Thompson, author of Communion Town An utterly charming take on community and connection * Image *