The Swimming Pool: From the author of ITV’s Our House starring Martin Compston and Tuppence Middleton

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Of course, one of our main aims is to help improve the all-round health of the local community. That’s why we’ve partnered with organisations such as the Knights GP Surgery, Connect Health and Sports for Confidence, to help build our members’ physical and mental health. The Swimming-Pool Library won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1988, and the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1989.

Whilst I was very impressed with Louise Candlish's writing and her eye for a incisive and pithy summation of the tensions between all parties in The Swimming Pool, I needed more substance and depth to connect with the story and characters involved. Just like Natalie. It turns out Natalie was a bully and did some terrible things one summer that had a ripple effect on the victims.Moreover, the ending is the most beautiful thing in the book and made me decide for five stars, instead of the four deserved by the rest of the novel, especially because of the way it creates a parallelism between mother and daughter.

In The Spell, Alex – who has "contracted the occasional ailment of the late developer, an aversion to his own past" – recalls his horror of the country town in which he'd grown up, with its "old outfitters selling brown and mauve clothes [and] photos of fetes and beauty contests and British Legion dinners in the window of the newspaper office, which might almost have been the window of a museum". He also tenderly recalls the solitary child's "taste for lonely places", playing hide and seek alone. "It can't be hide and seek if no one's coming to look for you, darling," his mother tells him. "It's just hide." Hollinghurst's hero, Henry James, had three distinct writing periods – early, middle and late. He even seems to have imagined them in capital letters. Does Hollinghurst think in those terms? "No," he says firmly. "That would be insanely self-conscious and self-important. I've always felt I was going gropingly into the future." Yet The Stranger's Child, with its wider canvas, excavation of the past and rumination on whether we can ever really establish the truth, does mark a new chapter. It may not be Middle Hollinghurst, in the sense in which James would have understood it, but it is the work of a middle-aged writer, whereas the four earlier novels were the work of a younger man galvanised by his arrival in London and by exposure to a suddenly more assertive gay world after 10 years doing EngLit at Oxford in the 70s. If, as Schopenhauer said, the first 40 years of life supply the text and the next 30 the commentary on it, Hollinghurst, at 57, is now well into the latter. Will goes to Phil's hotel. He encounters a rich Argentine who propositions him. Will accepts until he finds that the man is obsessed with gay pornographic conventions, costumes and sex toys. Will finds this all slightly ridiculous and is not aroused. He refuses to consent to sex and leaves. Hollinghurst does indeed look tweedy and staid in the school photograph that accompanies his article in the Canfordian. He has described living his life in reverse: hemmed in in his teens and 20s, when he was at Oxford, living in a house with Andrew Motion and doing a thesis on three gay writers, EM Forster, Firbank and LP Hartley, working at a time when it was not possible to write openly about homosexuality; then flowering in his 30s after he came to London. According to the worldly Lara, Ed resembles French film star Alain Delon from La Piscine and there are a fair few references to that film. The book doesn't parallel the film though; it merely echoes the film's smouldering passions, and in both book and film the eponymous pool becomes a character more or less in its own right.The Code provides a model of operation based on the authority of PWTAG good practice. Following the Code gives an assurance to operators and to the public that the pool meets essential healthy pool operational standards. Louise Candlish manages to convey Natalie's sense of desperately trying to better herself - and no on can really blame Natalie for just doing that - whilst still showing how foolish and single-minded she becomes as the novel goes on. I was shouting at her 'NO!' a lot of the time inside my head, as I could see her shrugging off her own friends and even her own husband to spend more time with this new group of people whom really, she barely knows.

There’s also an eight-court sports hall, which is host to a huge number of sports, including netball – we sponsor the Billercay Netball Club – while the centre is also home to the Basildon & District Netball Association, as well as the Flames Junior Netball Club. Danny is chasing dreams of becoming an Olympic swimmer. When he misses his chance, he seethes with shame. Swimming here is a love-hate affair with the water: when it’s willing to have you, it’s transformational, but when it is against you, it’s devastating. On the train, Will cruises a young man whom he takes home; they engage in sexual intercourse. He begins to read Charles's papers. Natalie and Ed have been married 16 years. They're both teachers and they have one child, 13 year old Molly, who has a phobia about water. When the local swimming pool opens, Natalie starts attending and gets to know mega-glam, mega-wealthy, Lara. To her delight, Lara welcomes Natalie into her circle of friends with open arms. Soon Natalie is hanging out with Lara on a daily basis, ignoring the rifts that this creates with her former friends and her husband. At the match, Will meets Bill: a man he knows from the Corry. Bill is a weightlifter; a large muscular man who coaches teenage boxers. Trapped inside his body, Bill seems a fearful man. He is devoted to Nantwich, his patron, and to the boys he coaches. He is also carrying a torch for Phil.Using a bit of the past and a bit of the future and whole load of here and now, Louise Candlish spins an evocative and often haunting web around a group dynamic that is entirely fascinating. From Ed to Nat to Lara to Miles to the daughters and the sons and the friends (and the dogs) you will come to know them all. Or at least think you do. Then you may find that not everything is as it appears…. But this book isn’t just about this summer, we know that Natalie had a summer of madness many years earlier and as the tale of a different more murky natural pool, the setting for adolescent life in the 1985. The mystery is what does this long ago summer have to do with anything, except the haunting of Natalie as she relives her actions from that time. Aside from the prologue, “The Swimming Pool” brings you into the life of Natalie, a normal woman with a husband and a teenage daughter, who lives an extraordinary experience: make friends with Lara Channing, a local celebrity. She is thrown into an artificial environment that attracts her more and more, leading her to overlook her old friends and family. The film ignited controversy with audiences because of its ambiguous nature and unclear conclusion which can be interpreted in various ways. In France many comparisons were made with Jacques Deray's 1969 film La Piscine ( The Swimming Pool), starring Romy Schneider and Alain Delon.

This is a highly original memoir from a Canadian swimmer who made the Olympic trials, but not the Olympic team. She’s also an art editor and graphic novelist, and includes some of her own paintings and photographs of her many swimsuits, which give this book a different texture and flavour. It’s included here in part for personal reasons. She mentions former Canadian Olympian Victor Davis, who I had the good fortune of meeting as a young swimmer: I swam for the same club as he did and when our practice times overlapped, he kindly signed my swim cap. The Swimming Pool is a decent novel and it's interesting to read about a world of enforced social roles and glamor that no longer exists. Although I would probably drop it down to 3.5 stars. Candlish’s writing is certainly detailed and impressive, and her story is dark and gripping, but personally I could have done with less waxing lyrical about well-off neighbours with expensive taste and terrace views of the newly-opened pool that gleams dangerously in the sunlight, and more of a focus on tightening up her already-intriguing characters and their motivations to turn a good novel into something great.Swimming Pool premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on 18 May 2003, [4] and was released theatrically in France three days later with a U cinema rating, meaning it was deemed suitable for all ages. It was given a limited release in the United States that July and was edited to avoid an NC-17 rating due to its sexual content and nudity. It was subsequently released in North America on DVD in an unrated cut. I couldn't have asked for more, really, and feel so proud that readers are continuing to discover it and recommend it far and wide. Though he always had a novel "on the go", Hollinghurst initially saw himself as a poet. He published a well-received volume of poetry with the provocative title Confidential Chats With Boys in 1982, but says the muse deserted him in 1985 on the day he signed a contract for a book of poems with Faber. In any case, by then the novel that was to establish him was well under way. The narrator, Natalie, is one of those people that make you wonder whether she's actually a nice person or not. Though she's not part of Lara's gang of high class, incredibly rich socialites, she really, really wants to be. She seems to look up to them so much, and this desperation, coupled with the way she treats her family and friends in trying to get closer to Lara, makes people turn against her. We also learn about a chequered past many summers ago, and though Natalie seems the most remorseful of the two, she's certainly no angel. Unexciting Ed despairs and resents his wife for leaving their old stodgy and judgemental friends to swan of with the libertine couple Lara and Miles, who have a secret past.