Surfacing

'The world has a thousand ways of reducing us. Some loud, some gentle. Some dressed as love, some as duty. Sometimes it can feel easier to shrink. To accept the version of you being offered. To believe this is the size of you now. But it isn’t. When life narrowed, I refused to shrink. I set off. And I swam' We are all looking for a way to live that feels true. For Kate Rew, swimming outdoors, beneath the sky and through the elements, is that way: it’s a cannon of joy in a complicated world where, when life closes in, it’s all too easy to lose sight of the horizon. Kate does not swim to make herself better - ‘life is not an illness and nature is not there for our therapy’- but because swimming is a way of letting meaning sneak back in through the body. In this inspirational, beautiful memoir-in-wild-swims, she swims with family, with friends and strangers: up a cold Welsh estuary where the tide surges under low autumn skies; down 24 kilometres of peat-dark river from the Arctic Circle where reindeer watch from the banks; in muddy rivers and ditches close to her Somerset home and in Guernsey sea gullies where clear waves tower above her as they power through. Surfacing is a life-affirming story of connection -with people and with the world - and about what it means to be alive. Taking us on an exhilarating, heart-opening journey through rivers, seas and reservoirs both close to home and further afield, it’s a book for anyone who has ever felt hemmed in, for anyone who wants to lift their eyes to the horizon and keep striking out for more. It’s about not being afraid of what’s around the next bend.