Shiver: the lessons of the lochs

"I have never been drowned, but I have had a wave lift me off my feet, tear me off course, sweep me away somewhere I did not mean to go, and force me to search for a new way back to the shore – and fear, for a moment, that perhaps there might not be any way at all. I waded into the waters of my new life with no intention but to win myself a home and find myself in it again. That was the plan. I felt that the time was approaching when I might need to feel myself again, and feel myself at home. " 

A woman swims her way back to sanity after her life is violently upended, by seeking to plunge into every one of Scotland's thirty thousand lochs. SHIVER is the result: a lifetime's quest, an ode to the Scottish landscape, and a siren song of the healing properties of water. Refreshment, resilience, resistance. 

"I swam because I would not be cowed. I have a problem with authority." 

A single mother of three. A Welsh resident of Scotland's capital with Irish parents. A keen observer of nature, literature and myth. An obsessive lover of loch living. Brigid Lowe is a singular woman and a singular writer. And she has written a book that is surely the most beautiful ode to wild swimming since Roger Deakin's Waterlog. Immersing herself and her reader in cold water poetically and psychologically, Lowe floats her knowledge of the history and the geology, of the mythological landscape and the physiological and psychological journey, towards us, and we accustom ourselves to its clarifying crispness and to having our breath taken away by her writing.