In The Spell, Alex – who has "contracted the occasional ailment of the late developer, an aversion to his own past" – recalls his horror of the country town in which he'd grown up, with its "old outfitters selling brown and mauve clothes [and] photos of fetes and beauty contests and British Legion dinners in the window of the newspaper office, which might almost have been the window of a museum". He also tenderly recalls the solitary child's "taste for lonely places", playing hide and seek alone. "It can't be hide and seek if no one's coming to look for you, darling," his mother tells him. "It's just hide." Mary Roberts Rinehart wrote mystery novels and other forms of fiction and non-fiction, between 1908 and the mid 1950s. I'm not sure how I discovered her, possibly through my mother? I got my hands on Rinehart's novel "The Album" when I was a teenager, and fell for it with every fiber of my Agatha Christie-obsessed nerdy little heart. The Album opens with an ax murder that happens in broad daylight in a home on a street mostly inhabited by families who still live as if it's 1897, though in the book it's more like the 1920s. I love The Album so much!

So many undercurrents swirl around this novel, touching on social anxiety, envy, the desire to the in-crowd, the fear of stagnation and ageing... The title of the novel references the 1969 film La Piscine starring Alain Delon, recently remade, which Lara screens to her friends to celebrate the lido’s opening. There are hints that the novel might come to parallel the film (in which an attractive teenage girl stokes the rivalry between her father and his male friend, who ends up drowned in a villa pool). I wondered if and how it would do that. Another question posed but unanswered for much of the book, is why Lara wants to befriend Nat? Natalie, a little jaded and dissatisfied with her life, is drawn toward Lara, an exotic local woman and the driving force behind the lido renovation. Lara, ex championship swimmer and actress is beautiful and rich and is the de facto leader of a small group of monied and glamorous friends.I'd read The Sudden Departure of the Frasers and really enjoyted it, so I hoped this would be another well-written novel with a good few twists and turns - and I wasn't disappointed! Will goes to an exhibition of photographs by Staines. The theme is soft-core homo-erotica. He is surprised to find Gavin there. Talking with Staines, he discovers that he and Charles have produced three pornographic films of the type that play in the cinema where Will first had sex with Phil. But this book isn’t just about this summer, we know that Natalie had a summer of madness many years earlier and as the tale of a different more murky natural pool, the setting for adolescent life in the 1985. The mystery is what does this long ago summer have to do with anything, except the haunting of Natalie as she relives her actions from that time. This is the second book I've read by Louise Candlish and she has a highly readable style that pulls you right in. However the storyline in this instance is less compelling than in "The Sudden Departure of the Frasers". It takes a very long time to get going. The tension simmers along but not a lot happens until the final third of the book. In the final third there are pleasing twists and discoveries, but you have to be patient to get to them. I suspect that Candlish realised this problem and that's why she added the prologue which is (minor spoiler, minor spoiler) highly misleading and really annoyed me when I realized how it fitted into the story.

Just like Natalie. It turns out Natalie was a bully and did some terrible things one summer that had a ripple effect on the victims. A bit about me: I live in a South London neighbourhood not unlike the one in my books, with my husband, teenage daughter, and a fox-red Labrador called Bertie who is the apple of my eye. Books, TV and long walks are my passions - oh, and drinking wine in the sun with family and friends. My favourite authors include Tom Wolfe, Patricia Highsmith, Barbara Vine and Agatha Christie. On the train, Will cruises a young man whom he takes home; they engage in sexual intercourse. He begins to read Charles's papers. Will goes to Phil's hotel. He encounters a rich Argentine who propositions him. Will accepts until he finds that the man is obsessed with gay pornographic conventions, costumes and sex toys. Will finds this all slightly ridiculous and is not aroused. He refuses to consent to sex and leaves. Though he always had a novel "on the go", Hollinghurst initially saw himself as a poet. He published a well-received volume of poetry with the provocative title Confidential Chats With Boys in 1982, but says the muse deserted him in 1985 on the day he signed a contract for a book of poems with Faber. In any case, by then the novel that was to establish him was well under way.Louise Candlish is a fabulous writer and The Swimming Pool is quite addictive. So dark, yet so perceptive, I loved it. This centre has implemented a cashless system. This has significantly reduced queuing times and improved customer service. Using a bit of the past and a bit of the future and whole load of here and now, Louise Candlish spins an evocative and often haunting web around a group dynamic that is entirely fascinating. From Ed to Nat to Lara to Miles to the daughters and the sons and the friends (and the dogs) you will come to know them all. Or at least think you do. Then you may find that not everything is as it appears…. Nat, helplessly drawn to Lara, finds life increasingly wrapped around her new friend. Nat’s aquaphobic daughter Molly, 13, is befriended by Lara’s gorgeous 15-year old daughter Georgia, the bees knees in a group of friends who congregate almost daily around the lido and get up to things that Nat, anxious about her daughter’s well-being, would like to know about. Meanwhile Ed, according to Lara an Alain Delon-lookalike, starts to give maths lessons to the Georgia, while Lara seems keen to help Molly overcome her fear of getting in the water... However tension is simmering. We know from the prologue and also from the sub-plot, set a few weeks in the future, that drama is not far away. We know that Natalie has secrets from her past that she hasn't even told her husband. We sense, even if Natalie doesn't, that Lara's dazzling attentions are too good to be true. What we don't know is where the danger will come from. Will it comes from Molly's phobia? From Natalie's past? From Lara's hidden motivations? Or somewhere else entirely?

According to the worldly Lara, Ed resembles French film star Alain Delon from La Piscine and there are a fair few references to that film. The book doesn't parallel the film though; it merely echoes the film's smouldering passions, and in both book and film the eponymous pool becomes a character more or less in its own right. As long as 5,000 years ago, the allure of the sea inspired humans to recreate its essence in miniature artistic forms, such as public baths where ancient rituals would take place. Since then, swimming pools have become status symbols and a source for a gamut of purposes from athletics to the simple pleasure of just being in water. It is no wonder, then, that filmmakers and photographers constantly return to the swimming pool as a subject and setting. This is a chronicle of swimming adventure, and to my mind one of the finest. I cannot fathom how Cox has managed to do these swims: more than a mile in the Antarctic; the first person to swim the Straits of Magellan in Chile; the first person to swim around the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. She also did her bit to thaw relations between the US and Russia during the cold war by swimming the Bering Strait. Her tales from the sea are as extraordinary as she is. Natalie is a teacher, so she has a long and lazy summer ahead of her. For the first time in many years the Elm Hill lido is open again. The pool has been restored and is a glorious place to spend a warm summer day. Natalie feels at home there immediately. Her daughter Molly can't swim and is afraid of water, but fortunately she's old enough to spend time with her friends, so Natalie can still go to the pool. There she meets Lara and she's drawn to her like a moth to a flame. Lara is glamorous, gorgeous and popular, everything that Natalie is not.After reading the author's previous novel The Frasers, I thought I'd finish this one as well to compare as they both have a similar plot. Normal, boring woman gets involved with charismatic rich woman and shit goes down storyline. The Swimming Pool is a decent novel and it's interesting to read about a world of enforced social roles and glamor that no longer exists. Although I would probably drop it down to 3.5 stars.