Night swimming by Sharon Kernot

Night swimming takes us into the chaotic mind of a woman struggling with insomnia, alcohol and prescription drugs; the fog of dreams and memories blurring with reality. January Clare Colson is consumed by feelings of grief and guilt, haunted by a sense of responsibility for her teenage friend’s death, decades ago. She and Julie were the best of friends until jealousy over a man’s attention gradually snaked between them. Childhood besties became ‘adolescent rivals playing with fire’.

Years later, when the man at the centre of their combined youthful infatuation walks into the office where she works, she becomes intent on tracking him down, and a thirst for revenge sees her disguising herself and stalking him, driven to understand his role in the trauma of her past.

Kernot’s psychological thriller takes the form of a verse novel; separately titled poems present scenes layering upon each other to build a picture of the past. But January Clare is an unreliable narrator, falling in and out of hallucinatory episodes. What better way to present the confusion of her mind than through poetic verse that repeatedly draws on images of swimming and drowning. How will she protect herself as she draws ever closer to the man with the wide wolfish smile and flash of sea-blue eyes, in what seems to be a perilous game of mutual subterfuge.

Kernot’s writing is sensuous, repetitive and consuming. It carries you along breathlessly as January Clare’s world seems set to implode. Like all good thrillers, the threads only come together, most dramatically, at the end. It is an absorbing read, a psychological thriller, in the style of Dorothy Porter’s verse novels, whilst sharing themes of memories, deception and the obsessive female stalker, as found in the recently translated Hanna Johansson thriller Body double (2026). 

Kernot’s venture into writing an adult verse novel follows her success as YA author of engaging lyrical free-verse novels Birdy (2024) and Art of taxidermy (2018).

Themes: Thriller, Memories, Identity, Stalking, Jealousy, Deception.

Helen Eddy