Skin, Kerry Andrew’s bold and immersive follow-up to Swansong, begins in London in 1985 with the disappearance of Joe, father to eleven-year-old Matty. Over the course of the long, hot summer that follows, Matty discovers the ponds at Hampstead Heath and is introduced to a community of men who offer a refuge from an increasingly rocky home life.

Fourteen years later, Matty travels westwards through Ireland, swimming its wild loughs and following the scant clues left behind about Joe – and having to confront the past head-on.

Inventive, compulsive and deeply moving, Skin is a novel of loss and recovery, of wild swimming and identity from a rising star of British fiction.