As always, Rose Tremain's characters have a way of sneaking up on you as you read. The gentle meandering through intersecting lives overshadows the slow moving story because, really, it's ofetn not the story that makes Tremain's writing addictive, but the depth and complexity of her characters. THE SWIMMING POOL SEASON is filled with very human characters - Larry & Miriam, Gervaise & Klaus, Nadia, Xavier and many more, are the story -their strengths, their fears, their hopes and their losses, their (at times hopeless) search for love, were what kept me reading.

However, the book (written in 1985) did have a "dated" feel to it and at times the darker hopelessness of ordinary lives made the book far too melancholy. The ending, too, was a bit unsatisfactory. An enjoyable read overall, but doesn't match the brilliance of The Colour or Music & Silence [This review is for the Kindle edition] ( )

Poetic, literary and stuffed with French people, this read like Joanne Harris with A’levels. The title’s swimming pools are built by the (nominally) central characters Larry and Miriam, whose building firm went bust and who are now living in rural France. They are only the nominal central characters as the omniscient narrator casts its eye wide, taking in such peripherals as Miriam’s mother’s late husband’s ex scholar’s girlfriend. So many characters, many of them romantically involved with more than one other character, and yet only an average length book. Each has a relatively small opportunity to shine, and as such the depth of detail invested in each character is impressive, but I found the book overall to be dry and (aside from Nadia’s wobbly grammar) lacking in humour. Aside from urging Larry to tell his wife to s*d off I felt little sympathy or connection with any of them. Well written but ultimately a bit dull. ( )

An interesting cast of characters in a selection of interesting situations... but somehow the book never really gels into a whole. I feel as if it either needed more focus or more pages. Will try again with Rose Tremain though! ( )

A book full of absolutely flamboyant characters! No reader would complain about them "not being fleshed out" ! ( )