This fine work surprising and absolutely true.' -Karen Holt, O, The Oprah Magazine 'Astute. she then injects a detail that makes us see the situations in a whole new light. Easing readers in with recognizable characters facing familiar situations. Packer can break your heart-and she can mend it, too. Swim Back to Me is even better, richer, more insightful. lovely, masterful collection.' -Mameve Medwed, Boston Globe 'Most readers know Ann Packer from her best-selling debut novel.

Praise for Ann Packer's Swim Back to Me 'As funny as it is sad. With Swim Back to Me, she delivers shimmering psychological precision, unfailing intelligence, and page-turning drama: her most enticing work yet. Ann Packer is one of our most talented archivists of family life, with its hidden crevasses and unforeseeable perils, and in these stories she explores the moral predicaments that define our social and emotional lives, the frailty of ordinary grace, and the ways in which we are shattered and remade by loss. And, in the masterly opening novella, two teenagers from very different families forge a sustaining friendship, only to discover the disruptive and unsettling power of sex. A young man comes to grips with the joy-and vulnerability-of fatherhood. A woman shepherds her estranged parents through her brother's wedding and reflects on the year her family collapsed. A mother mourns her teenage son through the music collection he left behind. A wife struggles to make sense of her husband's sudden disappearance. From Ann Packer, author of the New York Times best-selling novels The Dive from Clausen's Pier and Songs Without Words, a collection of burnished, emotionally searing stories, framed by two unforgettable linked narratives that express the transformation of a single family over the course of a lifetime.

Swim back to me by ann packer