The Second Swimmer

About this book

In August 2021, eighteen-year-old Robyn Toft walked out of the North Sea at Skelby with a nine-year-old boy in her arms, and the whole country watched her do it. For two years she was the Skelby girl: the sofa interviews, the swimwear deal, the town finally proud of something. Now she is twenty-two, works nights at a care home, and has not been in the water since the day she told everyone the truth. Then a thirteen-year-old boy from Leeds gets off a train without telling his mother. He wants to meet the man who held him under the waves before Robyn ever reached him. And that same weekend, the man comes home. Told backwards from the wreckage to the moment it began, this is a novel about loyalty, a borrowed heroism, and what a whole town will forgive, and what it won't.