Swimmer

She swims into the medals and then into oblivion -- a sensuous, searing, compact debut from an outstanding new British writer.

This is a striking, supple and direct debut from a new English writer that both promises an exceptionally exciting future and provides an unusual, accomplished and saleable debut.

It's a character piece, charting the life of a girl who becomes besotted with butterflies and swimming on the same holiday when an infant, then grows up to become a world-class swimmer before, at 19, obsolescence overtakes her with disorienting haste...If taken on its own terms -- as an intense and focused portrait -- it is simply staggering; a miniature, but a perfect one.

It is stuffed with gorgeously apt and fresh imagery and has tremendous verve about it.

It reads, in fact, like a race, as it should.