His daughters rush home to be with their father, but are perturbed by Gil's claims that he saw Ingrid and that she is alive. The opening chapter sees Gil suffering an accident after seeing his long lost wife standing below his window. Though Ingrid presumably drowned, the lack of a concrete answer plagues the family: could that woman disappearing around the corner be her? Could the phone ringing in the middle of the night be their mother finally wanting to return home? Here, the hope of Gil Coleman and his daughters, Nan and Flora, has haunted the family for twelve years, ever since Ingrid Coleman (Gil's wife and the girls' mother) disappeared and was never found. Swimming Lessons is a character-driven novel about a family, a love, a marriage, and how hope can be the worst thing sometimes. I can say confidently now that it's more the latter. I haven't read the author's previous work - Our Endless Numbered Days - and I couldn't decide from the synopsis whether I was going to get myself into another thriller spawned by the Gone Girl craze, or a quiet contemporary like, say, Everything I Never Told You. I didn't really know what to expect when going into Swimming Lessons. “It’s difficult to live with both hope and grief.”
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