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.
IN A NUTSHELL
‘Night Swimmers’ is slight from a plot point of view but it’s also wonderful. It walks the line of dealing with grief and loss in a way that offers hope, with no guarantees and kindness with no second thoughts but avoids schmaltzy sentimentality. The dialogue is spot on and the prose has the lightness of touch of a simple line drawing that captures the essence of something in a few strokes.
The cover of ‘Night Swimmers‘ caught my attention but it was the opening paragraphs that made me buy the book:
“SHE HEARD THEM BEFORE she saw them, a cluster of brightly coloured chickens, fussing at the water’s edge, flapping and clucking.
‘Silly bitches,’ she said.
Treading water, blinking the salt from her eyes, she watched them for a moment. They were folding towels, stowing phones in yoga-bags, pulling off sandals. They were toeing the water, expressing dismay at its temperature. They were coming in, now. She could hear the giggles and the tiny little screams of surprise as the water met their smooth white feet. They wore dinky little swim-hats and their shoulders were hunched and pale and narrow.
She flipped herself over and ducked down, down, down under the surface, letting the sparkle of her bubbles soothe her, feeling the cold rush over her skin, her belly, her thighs. A cool hand. She felt the tick of her pulse grow heavy as she dived into the dark, but kept going, kept swimming and wriggling downwards until her heart became a knocking in her throat and temples, forcing her to turn back, push to the surface again, pull fresh air in and blink and drip and breathe and look out to sea and try to pretend she was on her own.
‘What the hell are they doing here?’ she grumbled, lying back crossly and kicking great columns of water up into the air, letting it rain down again, delicious. She could have stayed for ages longer but the shrieking and splashing carried out across the still plane of water in the bay – her bay – and jangled her, spoilt it all. No one ever came all the way around here, to this pebbly, inhospitable place. They put up their windbreakers and their deckchairs and the rest of their shit back around the corner on the main beach where the sand lay golden and inviting and cool and bright, and left this place for her.
Bugger, she thought.”
It was a good decision. ‘Night Swimmers‘ was a joy to read. The story flowed effortlessly, less like a plot and more like life happening to you. The language was precise without feeling overwrought. The imagery was powerful without pushing the story to one side like an over-loud soundtrack. The characters were relatable but intriguig because their depths, relationships and histories were revealed slowly and indirectly. The dialogue was spot on. Most of all, I liked that the people and the place felt part of the same cloth -one could not be fully understood without the context of the other.
The story’s plot is slight but the lives described within it are richly textured and beautifully drawn. The ‘Night Swimmers’ uses an unexpected COVID lockdown to bring together two people who have little in common except that their lives have been fractured by traumas that have left them tangled in the nets of loss and grief. One is a life-long resident of the village whose story, or a version of it, is known to everyone who lives there. One is an outsider, who seems to be a tourist but who is really in a self-imposed exile from his former life. One is dealing with emotional scars that are decades old. One is still staggering under the weight of a recent trauma. Each of them is trying to find a path that offers hope of future worth having.
In other hands, this set-up might have turned into a life-affirming romance or a series of Hallmark moments of mutual redemption. In Roisin Maguire’s hands, it became an exploration of grief and the possibility of hope.
For me, one of the strengths of ‘Night Swimmers‘ was that it showed the need for solitude, for quiet, for the freedom to be alone, not as something dysfunctional that needs to be fixed but as something that can bring healing and peace. There is a joy to swimming alone in the dark of night that is not about an inability to face the sun. It allows for a difference between solitude loneliness
Grief is as much a character in this book as the people and the landscape. Like the other characters, the nature of grief is disclosed gradualy and indirectly. The story spoke to me about grief by immersing me in how the two main characters experience it. Grief is shown as akin to swimming through the cold dark depths with the same temptation to stop swimming, give in to the cold and drown. The gradual emergence of hope is akin to recovering from the deep cold of the sea by slowly raising the temperature of the shower water.
‘Night Swimmers‘ is a gem of a book that will resonate with anyone who hears solitude’s call and has known grief’s grip.
Roisin Maguire lives in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland, where she works as a business manager. In 2019, she completed the Write Here… in Belfast novel-writing course, taught by Jan Carson, which was designed to discover exciting, new Northern Irish voices in fiction. ‘Night Swimmers‘ (2024) is her first novel.
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