DNF. The environmental sci-fi aspect of this was very interesting, but I struggled with the writing style. It felt very all over the place and if I hadn't already read Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea I would probably have been very lost. The depression/lack of control/pregnancy stuff is also just very difficult for me to read about.

A very sad story that I found quite difficult to follow. Excellent world building and writing, but the plot and my confusion let it down for me somewhat

Read courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher.

I love Wide Sargasso Sea and a work of eco-fiction in dialogue with it was obviously up my alley. Interesting style and structure, some wonderfully intricate worldbuilding, but I confess in the end, it didn't all cohere for me - but perhaps this is on purpose. I kind of expected something darker, grimmer - but then, complaining "too much hope" seems to be misguided. Perhaps - "the beginning led me to believe this would go in another direction"? But of course, ymmv.

Beautifully written and once Womack says she was inspired by VanderMeer, that made so much sense.

A dystopia with a promising and different premise, but whose development felt somewhat confusing and imprecise.

Thanks so much to the author, Netgalley and the Publisher for the eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I read about half of this book. It's a slow, strange, sad story composed of memories and flashbacks from a woman living in a care pod in orbit, waiting to give birth. The earth has undergone profound climate changes and the people left live in a caste system delineated by technology, adaptations and surface/ inside the wall/ outside the wall locations. It is a very interesting society. I enjoyed seeing the different places that the character sees and how her impressions develop. There's a lot about the nature of experiencing space and how the experiences you have change how you interact with and understand spaces.

I couldn't finish this because it made me too sad. Sometimes I'm all for a sad book, but I simply couldn't keep going with this one at this time. I hope that's a positive reflection on the quality and emotional tenor of the book - it was too good at what it did.

I'm sure many people will enjoy this and I would have a lot more at a different time.

Marian Womack’s The Swimmers is an unusual dystopia. It’s not like all those dystopias, which have ended on silver screen, this does not have a teenage heroine who must save the world and there is no love story that is essential in saving the world.

In this world, things happen after Green Winter, that has changed the desert world into a world with green patches, that are growing and are dangerous to people that still live on earth. Beside the people who live on the surface there are people who live above earth, on a Ring. The green is vibrant and alive and carnivorous, and the animals are big and feral and their fur has neon colored stripes. Everything has changed, but some things are the same as it is now in our world. There are people who are expendable, the oceans are polluted with plastic, if not green the earth is desert dry and people need something to believe in, so they could go on with their life.

Pearl and Arlo, the protagonists, tell their stories in turns, talking about things right now and things in the past. Little by little we get the picture, why they live like they live in this moment, why they make those decisions and how they could go on.

It’s a different kind of dystopia, and that’s why it is an interesting read.

This is a new author for me. The blurb intrigued me. I enjoyed a lot about the book but some aspects fell a little short for me so it was a mixed bag of a read, a solid middle-of-the-road. The timeline of the book moves back and forth and it’s not always clear where and when you are. It sometimes took a few pages to ground myself in time and place which I didn’t like. I enjoyed the writing style, there’s a dreamy aspect to the writing which I found very enjoyable. I liked the fact there are multiple narrators as well. I think the world building could have been better as I wanted to know more about how the world got to that point and I felt like in the Ring could have been explored more.

** I received a copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

I had such high expectations for this book coming in. While it lived up to most of them, at times the story got confusing as the time lines switched back and forth. At times it would take me a page or two to really figure out what time and where the story was taking place. The ending also felt a little bit rushed and I felt like it could have been fleshed out a little bit more. The writing style was very detailed and dreamy which I enjoyed. I also really enjoyed the shifting POVs. I would have loved to learn more about how the earth got to be how it was in this story and more about life up in the Ring. But overall, this was a fun read that I wish had a little more structure to it.

Typically, I do like books with plots about humans who are trying to colonize a planet or dystopian world where they encounter difficulties, sentient aliens, harsh weather or in general things just do not turn out as they had hoped. Just thinking about that kind of plot encourages me to want to read it. For me, The Swimmers had a lot of promise but overall it just failed to keep my interest.

It was an interesting concept for a story and I felt quite drawn in for parts of it. Other parts were long and drawn out and I fought the urge to skim through in case I missed anything. I also wasn't overly sold on the characters or the episodic structure. Brings something pretty cool in concept but just didn't execute it well enough for me.

Firstly I want to say a huge thank you to Titan books for the advanced copy of this title. I was excited to see a new book from Marian Womack, her previous book The Golden Key was a book that I loved so I was eager to dive back into her ethereal writing style. Unfortunately this dreamlike quality, which worked so well in a gothic setting, fell short in this story for me.

The premise is strong and a stark take on the future we could find ourselves in, the rich continuing with their opulent lifestyle whilst the poor remain on what's left of the surface. The world has in many ways started to reclaim itself and the surface feels very colourful even if the local fauna is a much mutated version of how we would see it today. Reusing and recycling is a way of life, but society has also regressed to one full of superstition and stories over fact. The Swimmers is very subversive in this way and for those on the surface, including our protagonist Pearl, their myths have become part of their way of life, the salutary tales a clever means of control. The Woman in White a figure who both gives and takes in a way that feels immensely cruel, yet her stories continue to be told. I enjoyed how some of these stories were peppered throughout the book to really help drive home how close to propaganda some of them were.

Pearl was an interesting protagonist, her story jumps and is mainly in retrospect, I was never clear as to whether she was recollecting or dreaming but I liked how that matched how disorienting her life had become. One of the more fortunate of the surface dwellers she is top of a caste system which sadly still exists and I actually found it quite sad that with all the apparent progress, we still have a society heavily propped up by servitude. Her history is complex and her family full of secrets, her mother being one of the titular Swimmers - which If I'm being brutally honest, I'm still not sure I understand the significance of, especially as the ocean is pretty much a sheet of plastic debris. The introduction of Arlo as a second narrator was much needed and I found his sections in the earlier stages brought a real balance to haphazard recollections of Pearl. His eyes brought a fresh take to what was happening on the surface and I enjoyed his arc very much.

The sad thing for me is that I found The Swimmers to be so confusing. The story went in different directions and threads were left unanswered. The writing just didn't feel cohesive and I found it such a hard book to motivate myself to come back to. The Swimmers is not a book you can read piecemeal and I think that's perhaps why I struggled. I wasn't able to have a really large chunk of time and indeed the last quarter where I had more time, I found that I was, to a degree, able to get into the story. However I still felt like I was missing things and had to flip back to check.

All this being said though, The Swimmers had one of the most deeply satisfying endings I have read for a long time, I had no idea with the dwindling pages how it could be ended but a simple epilogue spoke of so much and painted the picture perfectly. However, for much of the story I felt that the focus was in the wrong place and I wanted to know what was happening elsewhere which was a shame as I think a bit more structure could have made this a book I would have really loved.

My thanks to Titan Books for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘The Swimmers’ by Marian Womack in exchange for an honest review.

Set on a future Earth ravaged by climate change the last of the human race is divided between those living on the surface among deep jungles and monstrous animals and those living in the Upper Settlement, a ring situated at the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere.
 
Its lead is Pearl, a young woman living on an isolated estate in the forests of Gobari, with her beautiful, mad mother, Urania. Following Urania’s remarriage, Pearl’s stepfather promises her to Arlo, a starborn, who descends from the Upper Settlement to claim Pearl as his bride.

‘The Swimmers’ proved to be a fascinating novel and I was quickly swept up by Womack’s rich, dreamlike descriptions, especially of the changed Earth. Her imagined mutated creatures were impressive including the human-sized, orange-furred hares, “Venus flytraps as big as a small child”, as well as “those strange days when the sky was green, blue, electric.” The cover art highlights those flytraps.

Her style is lyrical though at times this made the narrative a little hard to follow. Still, I just allowed myself to be swept up in the flow.

Apparently this eco-dystopia is a reimagining of ‘The Wide Sargasso Sea’ though to date I have never read that classic novel that itself references ‘Jane Eyre’. Still, it’s clear from the plot description that although set in a dystopian future it has many of the elements of the classic Gothic romance. She describes the novel as eco-Gothic, which I adore as a descriptive term.

Given the strict delineation between the various classes and Pearl’s mixed ethnicity, the novel also gives Womack the opportunity to explore issues of discrimination in its futuristic setting.

I was very impressed with her visionary writing and immediately bought her first novel, ‘The Golden Key’, and will be looking out for future projects.

The Swimmers first drew me in with its title (I'll never turn down anything that mentions swimming, let's be real). Then the cover blew me away, and I love me a dystopian, so there was really no doubt I'd be needing to read this book. I feel... complicated things about it, so let's break down what I enjoyed versus what I had trouble with!

What I Liked:

►The world itself is fascinating. I mean, it certainly seems plausible- a group who fancies themselves superior (i.e., richer) lives in luxury while those they deem inferior suffer in less-than-ideal conditions. And of course, the earth is all messed up, polluted, and flat out dangerous, because humans. I'm afraid I never fully grasped the intricacies of said world, sadly, which I will discuss later. But what I did get, I liked.

►The writing felt very atmospheric and contributed quite well to the overall vibe of the story. I certainly understood how desperate the conditions were, and felt for main character Pearl as she tried to navigate the world.

►I certainly rooted for Pearl. I won't say I felt particularly connected to her, but I felt for her, and I wanted her to end up okay. And you know, society in general to be more fair. For Pearl and us, I suppose.

What I Didn't:

►The pacing felt a bit off. The thing is, we knew via the switch between past and present, where Pearl's story ultimately ends up. And as the story is slower in nature and quite character-driven, it made it feel longer, not having that sense of anticipation. Pearl's chapters also had a tendency to be a bit long-winded, and while I enjoyed the writing quality, I did wish for a bit more action at times. It seemed like not much happened for a good chunk of the book. And that is okay sometimes! But it didn't really do it for me here.

►As I mentioned above, I was really kind of confused by parts of the world. We're introduced to terms I never fully understood the meaning of, and I kept waiting for it to "click" for me, but it never did. So I spent a fairly significant portion of the book just not getting it.

►While I didn't dislike Pearl's husband, Arlo (in fact, I felt that I understood what was going on much better during his POV), I didn't feel anything about their relationship at all. Perhaps this is a bit spoilery, but (view spoiler)

Bottom Line: A beautifully written and atmospheric book that paints a bleak future for the planet, The Swimmers left me a bit confused and underwhelmed at times.

I was really captivated by the premise of this book. But this was definitely not a book for me. I was often confused about what was going on and struggled to follow the storyline. I did enjoy the descriptions the author gave, it was easy to envision this world. I think if you're interested in dystopian books definitely give this one a shot.

This book was so so for me. I liked the commentary on global warming and climate change since I am an environmental science major, however something just felt off about the story that I can’t really explain. It was good enough though for me to make it all the way through!

The recent snowstorms in America remind us that climate change waits for no virus. We are still in a dangerous time and leadership on this is still weak. Exploring what this future means is where science fiction excels and Marian Womack in the entrancing The Swimmers creates a disturbing future that not only looks at environmental change but class, race and the use or abuse of knowledge.

We first meet Pearl who still lives on the Earth in a place named Gobari a settlement where she lives with her mother and family aides. It is a place where danger lurks in the forests; the Ocean is held back by a barrier and there is an ongoing threat that the forests may suddenly move and wipe the area away. Pearl is haunted by memories of her father and a scandal she can never quite remember. Pearl has connections to the shuvani people – one of the three groups left on Earth. Her mother eventually meets a wealthy merchant from the Ring a mysterious area in space home to the starborn he wants to settle but aids Pearl in her efforts to become a storyteller/archivist. Eventually though he proposes an arranged marriage with another man Arlo himself from the Ring that hangs in space. We know the story starts with Pearl pregnant and alone up in space and now we unpick how this tale came to be and where this world is finally going.

The word I will think of when describing the atmosphere of The Swimmers is imbalance. It is an absolutely fascinating novel where the entire world and not just characters is out of joint. Most of the world covered by an ocean of brown gunk, giant leviathans in the sea that can leap and soar into space; huge hares that can attack and eat people and that’s all before we get to the characters themselves. Pearl who we meet first telling us her life story is we first see someone trapped on the Ring and expecting to be dead once her child is born. We then skip back in time to meet her as a young woman trying to understand the world as she grows up. Womack makes the reader initially confused as terms and slang are thrown at us from the start. It’s a land that makes sense to Pearl even if she knows her knowledge is still incomplete – we as readers however need to work hard to understand it. I think this is very deliberate as this tale is about trying to make sense of the world. It requires attention as we move back and forth through Pearl’s younger life to explore folk stories, religion, social structures that make-up of this world but importantly by the time we start to get Arlo we really understand Pearl’s world and her worldview.

This makes Arlo’s reaction to Pearl and her world the more startling – he sees her world as backward and poor; this marriage is just initially an opportunity for him to do something with his life and we also see that on the Ring a greater truth is being withheld from those on Earth as to what is now going wrong. It is very noticeable that Arlo is described as having much paler skin to Pearl – his whole society is designed to enforce social superiority and seeing that we know Pearl’s Earth has just as much culture as above makes a sobering experience for the reader thinking about how the West colonised and abused other lands felt inferior.

We then trade points of view between the two and add in folk stories that now we know both side’s worldviews we can start to create the most likely truth. It is a very impressive piece of storytelling; not easy to digest but one I found well worth the concentration to piece the jigsaw of what has made this earth become the strange and dangerous place it is.

I was very impressed how much culture, science and religion Womack throws into the mix. A blending of old and new traditions that have evolved since the beginning of hat is known as the Green Winter that led to the Earth being changed so much. Self-sacrifice is a running theme. Pearl’s Father may have died protecting his daughter; we know those chosen to work on the Ring may never return and we also meet those who Jump and those who swim. The latter blasted into space for reasons unknown and those who decide to atone for the earth’s sins to plunge themselves into the ocean and swim for as long as their body can last. There is a terrible sense of life coming to an ill-defined end – be it by environmental collapse or a feeling that the Ring sees those on Earth only living to serve them. It’s intricate and complex and again needs the reader to work hard to piece the actual story of what is going on together. We tend to think of dystopia as authoritarian but here it feels more a world that has no focus; focused on tradition and the short-term without any real desire to break the slow death cycle we may be on. It is our own desire not to really make the required changes to save ourselves but here on steroids. There is a haunting scene where Pearl enters one of the last archives and it becomes apparent that as tradition has meant endless stuff is accumulated there is no actual order or even time to digest and make use of it for the future. A library that isn’t progressing human development may be one of the saddest things I’ve ever read and yet again shows a society that is stagnating before our eyes. All the credit though is to Womack’s amazing use of imagery – this a is a novel more of feelings and visuals or atmosphere rather than endless exposition explaining the science making this for me much more effective. You can feel the humidity, the heat and sense the sea and the forest reading this book which made for a powerful reading experience.

The development of Arlo’s relationship with Pearl is I think the one area I’d had liked a bit more time to explore. We focus on their early meeting and decision to part the ways, but the ultimate finale feels a little rushed. I though am very happy to see this is not yet another tale of a young woman sacrificed for dystopia and it actually feels right to end on a few notes of hope rather than hopelessness. The ending is ultimately earned for the surviving characters.

This is a wonderful read for the senses. I was very impressed by the approach taken and a book where the reader needs to immerse themselves into the world to understand it and then be able to look at those from above who clearly do not share that understanding gives us a brilliant about face. By the time we meet Arlo we are on Pearl’s side – we understand her world and how they have been betrayed and hence shocked at this capitalist, uber-rich society that sees Earth as a plaything. The message for today after that experience becomes rather clear. After the gothic fantasy of The Golden Key Womack has successfully moved into science fiction and I look forward to their next story with interest. Strongly recommended.

The Swimmers is a richly-imagined literary eco-dystopia that draws inspiration from Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea and presents an earth centuries in the future when life has irrevocably changed for all living creatures on our home planet. It's 2033 in Andalusia, Spain, and after the ravages of global warming, this is place of deep jungles, strange animals, and new taxonomies and in the tropical zone carnivorous plants and humongous animals have overrun the forests and continue to mutate with alarming speed. Social inequality has devastated society, now divided into surface dwellers and people who live in the Upper Settlement, a ring perched at the edge of the planet’s atmosphere. Within the surface dwellers, further divisions occur: the techies are old families, connected to the engineer tradition, builders of the Barrier, a huge wall that keeps the brown sludge plastic-polluted ocean away. They possess a much higher status than the beanies, their servants. The novel opens after the Delivery Act has decreed all surface humans are ‘equal’.

Narrated by Pearl, a young techie with a thread of shuvani blood, she navigates the complex social hierarchies and monstrous, ever-changing landscape. But a radical attack close to home forces her to question what she knew about herself and the world around her. This is a captivating and powerful story that explores the ongoing and future devastating effects climate change could have on our planet and ecology and the wider implications of social inequality, class and cultural differences, and displacement. This is prescient speculative fiction exploring the issue of climate change through a superbly crafted tale that is as heartbreaking as it is absorbing. It's vivid and realistic, and I found myself immersed in the narrative pretty swiftly. The world-building is intricate and the descriptions throughout of the landscape, the natural world and the dangers we as humans now face to find a solution to the predicament of climate change issues are dreamy and evocative. Highly recommended.

Firstly, huge thank you to Titan Books and NetGalley for providing me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.


The Swimmers takes place in the future on a dystopian Earth, which has been nearly destroyed climate change. Due to the climate change, there is a group of rich people who live in the Upper Settlement away from Earth and they consider themselves more superior. The first part of the story focuses on Pearl, who shows us the drastic changes to the world, including the mutated animals. We learn that her father is accused of killing another child when she was younger, but Pearl does not believe it. Just part of this journey is finding out what really happened.

Personally, this story felt very difficult to follow and all over the place. I did enjoy the overall concept, but it took extra effort on my end to follow along. As I was reading, I felt like I was missing crucial pieces of information or indicators if it was the future or the past. Frankly, I found myself flipping back several pages to see what I missed.

Its an interesting take of what the future could hold given our current path.

The Swimmers is the latest novel from Marian Womack, and much like her previous book, The Golden Key, it has a strange, dreamlike quality that makes reading it a unique experience.

The narrative follows Pearl, a young woman who’s grown up in a world of the far future, where the earth has been completely altered by climate change and out of control terra-forming, creating a place that’s almost unrecognisable for readers.

Following global warming the world has been transformed, covered in a vast, always changing jungle, filled with mutant animals. There are three groups of people surviving in this future: those who get to live high above the Earth in the huge ring that surrounds the planet; the Techies, old families who were once responsible for the construction and upkeep of the large barriers that keep out the deadly seas, but have to live on the surface; and the Beanies, a recently freed group of people that were once slave and servants, working in the Techie homes and growing food in the jungles.

Pearl is a Techie, and has grown up in a remote estate in the jungles, but after her father leaves her life after apparently killing a child, Pearl’s childhood takes a turn she didn’t expect. Eventually her mother remarries, and the family get to move to one of the last towns left, where she begins to learn more about the world around her, and starts to uncover some secrets about her family and their past.

I mentioned at the start that The Swimmers has something of a dream-like quality to it, and this is mainly due to the fact that the narrative is told from Pearl’s point of view, and that the book is written less like someone experiencing a series of events and recounting them to the reader, and more like someone looking back on their life. The narrative comes across more like a flow of consciousness than a more thought out telling of a story.

Pearl hasn’t rehearsed what she’s telling people, she isn’t writing it down in an easy to understand way, editing what’s there until it’s clear and easy to follow. Instead it will jump from point to point, with the timeframe of events moving around. She’ll start talking about one thing, but it seems to remind her of something else, so she switches her focus and talks about that for a bit, before going back to her original point. Because of this the book can at times feel pretty disjointed, and even hard to follow, however, it gets readers deeper into her mind than a normal first person perspective would normally manage.

The strangeness of the writing style, and of Pearl’s thoughts, are magnified in sections where another voice takes over, and we get parts written from another point of view. These segments feel more like a traditional first person perspective, and are closer to what most people would probably be used to experiencing. These segments help to give further context to Pearl’s story, showing events from different vantage points, and allowing deeper understanding of what’s going on, things that Pearl couldn’t possibly know. They also help to explain the conclusion of the book, something that if we were just following Pearl’s story alone would take a very sudden turn and conclude almost out of nowhere; yet together these two narrative types seem to work, and craft a mostly complete and satisfying narrative.

I say mostly, because there was so much about this world that I wanted to learn more about, yet readers were never really given that opportunity. Over the course of the book we learn a little about how the world ended up this way, but it feels like this was just the tip of the iceberg for the most part. We never really went deep into how things got to this point, who was responsible for the dramatic changes to the planet and its wildlife. We got tiny glimpses into the creatures that now inhabit the jungles and vast, plastic filled oceans, but only occasionally when an animal we’ve never seen or heard of before is mentioned in Pearl’s story. I really wanted Womack to go into this in more detail, to really show the weirdness and horror of this new Earth, yet it never happened.

I’d recommend The Swimmers to people who want to read a strange and multilayered story, one that will get you thinking and filling in the gaps, but if you’re not a fan of complex weaving narratives and opaque storytelling it might leave you wishing for something a little easier to digest.

Firstly, huge thank you to Titan Books and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

The Swimmers is a reimagining of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, set in a dystopian, futuristic, Earth that has been almost destroyed by global warming and climate change. This has led to extreme social inequality between those who live on the surface and those who live in the Upper Settlement. Pearl has lived on the surface her whole life believing that she knows the truth about The Ring, but after an attack close to her home and her union with Arlo, she begins to doubt everything she knows.

Both Pearl and Arlo were really interesting characters from the two extremes of their new world: with Pearl from the poverty stricken surface and Arlo comfortably living in the Upper Settlement. What I particularly liked was seeing how both of them believed that they knew the truth about the world and society, and how the word ended up the way it is. I also really enjoyed seeing how they would interact with each other about this and how they both developed because of their ‘union’. I really liked Savina as well, I liked the relationship she had with Pearl. There were a few characters that were introduced during the novel that seemed to just disappear as the novel progresses so it felt as though there were a couple of loose ends.

I liked how we spent a lot of the beginning of the novel learning about the world through the perspective of Pearl only to later go to Arlo’s perspective and then alternate between the two. I thought this was a great way to introduce the readers to society in a way that makes the reader suspicious of what is really going on even if Pearl appeared very naive at times (which could be a little frustrating). Additionally, not only did the perspective shift from character to character which was always made clear to the reader, the novel would also shift from past to present too which wasn’t always clear and made for some confusing reading in certain chapters which left me struggling to connect the dots.

Although this novel is a dystopian reimagining of Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, this novel can still be enjoyed as it is even if you haven’t read Wide Sargasso Sea (if you have, however, there are plenty of parallels and references which feel like nice little easter eggs). I really enjoyed the world that Womack had created, for the most part it felt like a whole different world rather than a post-apocalyptic Earth. Womack’s depiction of an Earth ravaged by climate change and the excess of plastic was my favourite aspect of the novel. Although Womack’s writing is beautiful and lyrical in places, the idea that this kind of world could be a reality was very much present gave the book a different edge that was unsettling.

Overall, despite my confusion over parts of the plot and some characters seeming to just disappear, this was a really interesting take on the usual dystopian setting which I enjoyed and is well worth checking out.

The Swimmers by Marian Womack is a strange, haunting novel. I haven't read the novel it's inspired by, but this book made me want to.

This is a hard book to review. I almost stopped reading so many times in the first 30%ish because it's slow, detailed, and confusing. The story jumps right into the setting and culture in a way that was hard to follow almost through the whole book. Like, it never laid out very clearly what everything was and what the places were in relation to each other, but at a certain point I could follow well enough....I think...

But it's bizarrely stunning! The writing is lyrical, beautiful. The dystopian system is terrifying, raw, and well written. I appreciated the theme of man manipulating nature ending with man's downfall, but it was subtle and clear rather than heavy handed. This story deals with huge themes, even other than environmentalism, but also racial and cultural divides, religion vs superstition vs technology, classism, sexism; all the sorts of elitism that follows humans wherever they gather. It's a story of sadness and beauty, gratitude alongside hopelessness, a disturbing imbalance between excess and need of all the wrong things.

This is a character and theme driven novel. It's long, challenging both in the reading of it but also emotionally, and the story is not told in a linear way but rather jumping from past to present to memory to different character's POV, to history/myth, back to present.

But despite all that, I loved this book. It's like one long poem or a strange dream. Haunting really is the best word for it. This won't be for everyone, but I do recommend this book.

Thank you NetGalley and Titan Books for a copy of this novel in exchange for my honest review.