The Swimming Pool Season

A slow-paced novel, set in a small French village and Oxford. Larry and Miriam have moved to their holiday home in France, escaping a failed swimming pool business. We meet their neighbours, a farming family, a Polish woman and the doctor. This is the 1980s and reading it today in 2025 it feels like the dark ages. Some characters don't have telephones at home and communication is complex and their understanding of the wider world feels almost medieval. Rose Tremain builds on this claustrophobic atmosphere as her characters lust after each other or become romantically involved. The swimming pool, modelled on a local cathedral, is a shared project between Larry and Klaus, the German and the son of the farming family. It brings happiness show more until the village's top family find out. An interesting read that was occasionally brilliant and sometimes slow. show less

An interesting cast of characters in a selection of interesting situations... but somehow the book never really gels into a whole. I feel as if it either needed more focus or more pages. Will try again with Rose Tremain though!

Poetic, literary and stuffed with French people, this read like Joanne Harris with A’levels. The title’s swimming pools are built by the (nominally) central characters Larry and Miriam, whose building firm went bust and who are now living in rural France. They are only the nominal central characters as the omniscient narrator casts its eye wide, taking in such peripherals as Miriam’s mother’s late husband’s ex scholar’s girlfriend. So many characters, many of them romantically involved with more than one other character, and yet only an average length book. Each has a relatively small opportunity to shine, and as such the depth of detail invested in each character is impressive, but I found the book overall to be dry and show more (aside from Nadia’s wobbly grammar) lacking in humour. Aside from urging Larry to tell his wife to s*d off I felt little sympathy or connection with any of them. Well written but ultimately a bit dull. show less

A book full of absolutely flamboyant characters! No reader would complain about them "not being fleshed out" !