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August 2020 
Erin’s mother has motor neurone disease and has decided to take her fate into her own hands. As Erin looks back at her twenty-six-year-old self, she can finally tell the story of the unimaginable task she faced one winter.
‘Chloe Lane’s The Swimmers is by turns touching, resonate, fiercely candid, and beautifully written. In this novel about a daughter’s attempt to help her mother receive a merciful death, Lane has sidestepped the clichés, and captured the enigma of what it means to save a life by ending one.’ —Jill Ciment, author of The Body in Question
‘The Swimmers has the kind of intelligent and beautiful quiet that explodes a brightness deep within the reader. It's an incredibly humane book that looks closely at love – not the easy, conventional love but the complicated, brutal love that invites us to at once forget ourselves and know ourselves completely. We are faulty and perfect in our faults. Sad and buoyant with our sorrows. I can't remember the last time I read a more generous book about care, courage and figuring it out.’ —Pip Adam, author of The New Animals and Nothing to See
'an intense, moving and darkly comic story about unrepentant, difficult women.' —Paula Morris, Canvas
‘Lane has captured such depth and heartache, sorrow and truth – I cannot remember the last time I was so moved by fiction.’ —Josie Shapiro, Read Close
‘Like all the best comic writing it’s marked by an enormous capacity to hold contradictory feelings.’ —Annaleese Jochems, Newsroom
Chloe Lane earned her MFA in Fiction at the University of Florida. She is also a graduate of the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington, and the founding editor of Hue+Cry Press. The Swimmers is her first book.
Cover painting: Peachthief, 2019, oil and acrylic on linen, 1000x900mm, by Nicola Farquhar
