Swimming Home

“The lone swimmer, turning over now to switch to a perfectly executed back crawl, wasn’t Oxford or Cambridge, wasn’t a man. It was a woman, a girl. It was Catherine. Of course it was Catherine.”

Fifteen-year-old Catherine Quick longs to feel once more the warm waters of her home, to strike out into the ocean off the Torres Strait Islands and swim, as she’s done since she was a tiny child. But now, living in London with her aunt Louisa who remains so distant, Catherine feels she’s lost her way.

In 1925, Louisa, a busy London surgeon who fought for equality for women, wants Catherine to pursue an education, the key to freedom. But Louisa has a shameful secret, and is ill-prepared for the repercussions of taking Catherine from her childhood home.

It takes the influence of enigmatic American banker Manfred Lear Black to convince Louisa to come to New York where Catherine can test her mettle against the Women’s Swimming Association and the first women in the world to swim the English Channel.

Like Mary-Rose MacColl's bestselling novel, In Falling Snow, Swimming Home tells a story of ordinary women who became extraordinary.