Imprint: Jonathan Cape
Published: 11/02/2021
ISBN: 9781787331648
Length: 368 Pages
Dimensions: 223mm x 34mm x 144mm
Weight: 514g
RRP: £16.99
'A writer of frankly alarming talent' ROBERT MACFARLANE
London, 1985. Joe, father to eleven-year-old Matty, has disappeared, and nobody will explain where he's gone, or why.
In the long, hot summer that follows, Matty's hunt for Joe leads to the ponds at Hampstead Heath. Beneath the water, there is a new kind of freedom. Above the water, a welcoming community of men offer refuge from an increasingly rocky home life.
Fourteen years later, a new revelation sees Matty set off alone in a campervan, driving westwards through Ireland, swimming its wild loughs and following the scant clues left behind about Joe. The trip takes a dangerous turn, and Matty is forced to rely on the kindness of strangers. But safety comes at a price, and with desire and fear running high, the journey turns into an explosive, heart-rending reckoning with the past.
Skin is inventive, compelling and deeply moving - a novel of loss and recovery, of wild swimming and identity from a rising star of British fiction.
*A 'BOOKS OF 2021' PICK IN i NEWSPAPER*
Imprint: Jonathan Cape
Published: 11/02/2021
ISBN: 9781787331648
Length: 368 Pages
Dimensions: 223mm x 34mm x 144mm
Weight: 514g
RRP: £16.99
Andrew's wonderful second novel is the deeply involving story of a difficult childhood, a search for a long-missing parent, how we view our bodies and the secrets we keep even from those who know us best.
A sweeping coming-of-age narrative whose on-point themes of gender and sexuality are embedded in evocative descriptions of London during the 1980s, and of boomtime Ireland a decade later
A gloriously raw and watery adventure, fraught with fluidity, teen-angst and identity; an update of Ovid's transformations and Catcher in the Rye, re-gendered in the Hampstead ponds and the deeper waters, far beyond...
I felt a real sense of loss when I read the last page. I didn't want this book to end. Andrew's writing is tender, beautiful, perfectly weighted. A writer we are immensely lucky to have.
An atmospheric creation... Skin stirs with references to water myths, from selkies and mermaids to sirens and cursed bodies of water.