The Swimming Pool: From the author of ITV’s Our House starring Martin Compston and Tuppence Middleton

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On the train, Will cruises a young man whom he takes home; they engage in sexual intercourse. He begins to read Charles's papers. What Lois find outs will change her outlook and the way she feels about her family. She will discover not only why Judith married her husband, but why Judith and her mother took a surprise vacation out of town right before it. She will discover how a murder that happened when she was just a girl, ties into the events going on now. This is a story of revenge gone wrong and fear so overwhelming that is clouds all judgement. It's a wonderfully complicated, twisting story that kept me entranced the entire time. Whilst I was very impressed with Louise Candlish's writing and her eye for a incisive and pithy summation of the tensions between all parties in The Swimming Pool, I needed more substance and depth to connect with the story and characters involved. Testing oneself against the water – in a pool or in the sea – is also a strong dynamic in these books. A few of the characters, at least, understand that the water is not something to be conquered, and that to swim in the sea is to enter into a discussion of sorts with the elements.

The Swimming Pool is a novel that oozes summer. Everything from the rising temperatures to the decreasing inhibitions of the main character makes Louise Candlish’s novel one that is best enjoyed sitting on a beach with the sun beating down and the sound of the surf roaring nearby. But that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it now we’ve moved to the other side of those heady days, either. Take away the summer glamour and The Swimming Pool becomes a dark and chilling thriller about hazy judgements and their inevitable fallout, which is certainly worth your time and attention.Can he imagine writing a book with no gay characters or gay themes? Pause. "I still slightly feel there are a lot of those around already, and I'm not sure my heart would be completely in it." He has embarked on his next novel, and says it will "certainly have a gay strand in it, though the protagonists will all be more or less heterosexual." The "more or less" is significant: sexuality in Hollinghurst's world is fluid. "There's a lot in The Stranger's Child which is rather liminal," he says. "There's quite a lot of bisexuality. One of the ideas of the book is about the unknowability or uncategorisability of human behaviour, and I was rather tempted into those ambiguous sexual areas." The intentionally ambiguous ending sparked much confusion and controversy. One interpretation is that Sarah was alone at the villa the entire time. This would mean that Julie is a fiction conjured by Sarah for the purpose of her new book – also titled Swimming Pool – which she presents defiantly to Bosload at the end of the film. Ozon has said:

When previously staid, middle-aged teacher Natalie Steele hears that the swimming pool near her home has been renovated, she’s anxious. Her daughter Molly has an extreme water phobia after all and a pool isn’t going to help. But, all too soon she is drawn to it, to the exclusion of pretty much everything and everyone else, well everyone that is except her new best friend Lara. Lara Faulkner is confident and glamorous as befits her former life as an actress, and the more sceptical in Natalie’s circle wonder what the attraction is? The fact that from Natalie’s perspective that there is an attraction is not in doubt! As the summer holiday unfolds Natalie begins to question all that she held most dear and for a while, wishes that the summer could last forever! The Swimming Pool – where the neigbourhood gathers – is a shiny glistening character in its own right here, whilst the ebb and flow of human nature dances around it, there it sits. You know from the start that something disastrous is coming and that the pool will play its part which gives it a gorgeous sinister aspect whilst sounding like the most fun place in the world to be. While I was reading The Swimming Pool I constantly felt ill at ease. I loved how Louise Candlish manages to keep a constant level of tension and suspicion. The Swimming Pool is a book filled with secrets, unreliable characters and fascinating events. Something has happened and it's slowly being revealed. Everything in this story is exactly as it should be and it's the preciseness that makes this book so incredible. Louise Candlish has a great sense of timing and she delivers exactly when the story requires it.And she lives with her brother in what once was (before the crash) her formerly-well-off family's summer home in the country; their sister Judith has years ago married very well and gone off to take her particular brand of spoiled beauty to the social columns. Will goes to an exhibition of photographs by Staines. The theme is soft-core homo-erotica. He is surprised to find Gavin there. Talking with Staines, he discovers that he and Charles have produced three pornographic films of the type that play in the cinema where Will first had sex with Phil. I wonder if, with the new novel done, he feels bereaved. "Normally, I do have a brief but acute sort of depression when I finish a book, which is to do with saying goodbye to this place you've been inhabiting. But I was so desperate to get this thing off that I seem to have escaped that." He has a deep, drawly voice – so deep he used to be known as Basso Profundo when he worked at the Times Literary Supplement in the 80s – and a hesitant, donnish manner, but his brown eyes sparkle behind his glasses, and he laughs a great deal, managing to take himself very seriously and at the same time not in the least seriously. It is not unusual to read of new friendships and new paths in life, but normally they are based around the lives of teens or young adults. Even the recently divorced or widowed have their stories used as an example of how life moves on. This novel takes a new approach. It is the unusual case and effect of a new friendship that seeps into a previously perfect life. What happens when a new influence in your life is the wrong one?

It suited her, however. It grew out into small blond curls all over her head, and she hated wetting it. Then, too, she swam badly. She could ride well. She could play the piano magnificently, but she hated the water. She was always afraid of the water. Perhaps that excuses her for what happened years later." Last April, I read and reviewed Louise Candlish's last novel; The Sudden Departure of the Frasers . I really enjoyed that book, a mix of darkness and suburban living. In The Swimming Pool, the author has continued that theme, and this really is a gripping story that cleverly looks at friendships and taking risks. In The Spell, Alex – who has "contracted the occasional ailment of the late developer, an aversion to his own past" – recalls his horror of the country town in which he'd grown up, with its "old outfitters selling brown and mauve clothes [and] photos of fetes and beauty contests and British Legion dinners in the window of the newspaper office, which might almost have been the window of a museum". He also tenderly recalls the solitary child's "taste for lonely places", playing hide and seek alone. "It can't be hide and seek if no one's coming to look for you, darling," his mother tells him. "It's just hide." I was tugged into the murky depths of this cleverly constructed poolside psychodrama (published May 2016, Penguin UK). It’s centred on a newly restored lido, supposedly somewhere in London. (I want to know where, it sounds amazing!) Natalie the novel’s narrator discovers the lido one summer when, set free from the school where she teaches, she’s led into the orbit of oh-so-glamorous Lara.Here I'm going to repeat some of my review of "The Great Mistake" by the same author, but only some!

This review first appeared on our blog, where we also chat to the author about writing, lidos and more... http://www.tripfiction.com/thriller-s... activityBookingConfirmationUrl":"/content/centerparcs/uk/en/jcr:content.activityBookingConfirmation.json",Main character plain and unremarkable Natalie Steele is a teacher. Happily married to boring and stale Ed, also a teacher. One fateful summer, a pool opens in their area, all the brainchild of local celebrity Lara Channing. Lara used to be a swimming star and also had a brief B-movie career.