Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012, Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home combines linguistic virtuosity and technical brilliance with a strong sense of what it means to be alive. As he arrives with his family at the villa in the hills above Nice, Joe sees a body in the swimming pool. But the girl is very much alive. She is Kitty Finch: a self-proclaimed botanist with green-painted fingernails, walking naked out of the water and into their holiday. Why is she there? What does she want from them? And why does Joe’s wife allow her to remain?