Swimming in the Dark
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
A psychological thriller that moves between New Zealand and Soviet dominated East Germany
In this river she is herself only. In this silken water, swimming through the deep, cold pockets and sun-warmed shallows, she is only skin.
German immigrants Gerda and Ilse Klein live sedate lives of seclusion and routine in a small New Zealand town. Both mother and daughter are affected by their memories of Leipzig, the city the family escaped from in the early 1980s while it was still under the rule of the Stasi. For Ilse, these memories are of a home and friends she loved and still longs for. For Gerda the memories bring the desperate depression which overwhelms her in the dark months of winter. But for now the women look forward to summer, with the promise of peace and rest as Ilse, now a teacher at the local high school, begins her weeks off. This expectation of peace is fractured when Ilse, while swimming in the local river, discovers Serena, one of the few students she has allowed herself to grow close to, alone, terrified and in the process of giving birth. Suspecting that Serena is a victim of abuse, Ilse and Gerda take her and her child into their home, a decision which becomes the catalyst for change; but when Serena and her child come under threat from the man who brutalized and molested her, the women unite to protect them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This absorbing psychological thriller from New Zealand author Richardson (Cross Fingers) explores four female characters' emotional responses to personal and societal abuse. Serena Freeman, a bright 15-year-old high school student who adores words, comes from a highly dysfunctional family. When a brutal cop targets her as his sexual prey in her small New Zealand town, no one intervenes. Ilse Klein, Serena's teacher, who escaped with her mother, Gerda, from East Germany in the early 1980s, offers Serena sympathy. After Ilse finds Serena on a river bank moaning in labor one night, Ilse leads the girl to her house, where she and Gerda deliver the baby. Serena and the baby live with these warm and loving women until the police come knocking at the door. Despite a superfluous secondary plot involving Ilse's affair with Anya, a childhood friend from Leipzig, the main story line honors the lonely and slighted victims of society with what German poet Heinrich Heine called "pain dipped in honey."
