The Swimmers

Erin’s mother has motor neurone disease and has decided to take her fate into her own hands. As Erin looks back at her twenty-six-year-old self, she can finally tell the story of the unimaginable task she faced one winter.

‘Chloe Lane’s The Swimmers is by turns touching, resonate, fiercely candid, and beautifully written. In this novel about a daughter’s attempt to help her mother receive a merciful death, Lane has sidestepped the clichés, and captured the enigma of what it means to save a life by ending one.’

—Jill Ciment, author of The Body in Question

‘The Swimmers has the kind of intelligent and beautiful quiet that explodes a brightness deep within the reader. It's an incredibly humane book that looks closely at love – not the easy, conventional love but the complicated, brutal love that invites us to at once forget ourselves and know ourselves completely. We are faulty and perfect in our faults. Sad and buoyant with our sorrows. I can't remember the last time I read a more generous book about care, courage and figuring it out.’

—Pip Adam, author of The New Animals and Nothing to See

'an intense, moving and darkly comic story about unrepentant, difficult women.'

—Paula Morris, Canvas 

Chloe Lane earned her MFA in Fiction at the University of Florida. She is also a graduate of the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington, and the founding editor of Hue+Cry Press. The Swimmers is her first book.