Our favourite New Zealand books stuff.co.nz - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from stuff.co.nz Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Book review: Where We Swim by Ingrid Horrocks
10 Apr, 2021 12:00 AM
3 minutes to read
Ingrid Horrocks new book is a series of musing on strange swimming explorations .
NZ Herald
Victoria University Press, $35
Despite the title and cover photograph there is not a lot of swimming going on in this book. By the time we have reached the halfway point, there has been an inadvisable crossing of a polluted river mouth in Taranaki; a splash around in an apartment complex pool in Medellin, Colombia; a nervous slide into a cordoned-off offshoot of the Amazon River; a hotel pool in Phoenix and another, embedded in the basalt cliff face, in the experimental metropolis Arcosanti in the Arizona desert.
Source: Massey University
Associate Professor Ingrid Horrocks is launching her new book of non-fiction, âWhere We Swim.â (photo/Ebony Lamb)
TitledÂ
Where We Swim (Victoria University Press), the non-fiction text will be launched at Unity Books in Wellington on 11 March at 6pm (COVID-19 alert levels permitting).Â
From beloved bays, beaches and rivers at home to the waters of Perth and the Peruvian Amazon, Dr Horrocks shares her reflections on a lifetime of swimming as a personal, embodied pleasure and a metaphor for interconnectedness with nature and each other.Â
Part memoir, part travel and nature writing, the Wellington-based author says her book offers new angles on how we relate to the natural world. âIâd wanted to remember why it was we swam in the first place â to remember the pleasure of immersing in an element other than air,â she says.