The Swimming Pool: From the author of ITV’s Our House starring Martin Compston and Tuppence Middleton

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The Code provides a model of operation based on the authority of PWTAG good practice. Following the Code gives an assurance to operators and to the public that the pool meets essential healthy pool operational standards. Louise Candlish takes a believable situation and clouds the underbelly in shadow. So I suggest that you go set up your sun-lounger and prepare to be entertained by the characters, setting and a plot that swirls like a whirlpool! Hollinghurst's own life has to be pieced together from shards of fact; not unlike the way lives gradually, reluctantly reveal themselves in his books. He says he has been "incontrovertibly" gay since he was an undergraduate in the early 70s, but prefers not to say when he first realised he was gay. He was an only child, the son of a bank manager in Stroud, Gloucestershire, which one imagines in the 50s as a sleepy, conservative country town. Just such a town is the setting for one section of The Stranger's Child; there is even a bank and a bank manager, who is married to Daphne's daughter and has been psychologically damaged by the second world war. I ask whether there is anything of his own father in that portrait. "They are very unlike my own parents, I'm rather relieved to say, but I spent the first eight years of my life living in a house above a bank and playing in the bank after everyone had gone home, so it was a plunge into memory doing all that, and I rather enjoyed recreating it." A lido has opened up nearby ....... an ancient, long derelict swimming pool, that has been trendily renovated and has become a major community focal point.

Last April, I read and reviewed Louise Candlish's last novel; The Sudden Departure of the Frasers . I really enjoyed that book, a mix of darkness and suburban living. In The Swimming Pool, the author has continued that theme, and this really is a gripping story that cleverly looks at friendships and taking risks. I realised early on that Molly was slightly different, and I don't feel its a spoiler to say that she has aquaphobia, a fear of being in water, or even being splashed. She has had various treatments for the condition but nothing has worked, and swimming lover Natalie just wishes Molly would overcome her fear. 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.Danny is chasing dreams of becoming an Olympic swimmer. When he misses his chance, he seethes with shame. Swimming here is a love-hate affair with the water: when it’s willing to have you, it’s transformational, but when it is against you, it’s devastating.

Regardless, I did thoroughly enjoy the characters, especially those of the protagonists Natalie and Lara. I liked the obvious contrast between the two women, who despite their glaring differences, strike up a friendship when they first meet. Many of Ronald Firbank's books are mentioned – The Flower Beneath the Foot, Valmouth, Caprice, Vainglory, Inclinations, among other ones. For The Strand lido outdoor pool, you'llneed to book a session onlinebefore you arrive. The session times are: activityBookingConfirmationUrl":"/content/centerparcs/uk/en/jcr:content.activityBookingConfirmation.json", Hollinghurst's hero, Henry James, had three distinct writing periods – early, middle and late. He even seems to have imagined them in capital letters. Does Hollinghurst think in those terms? "No," he says firmly. "That would be insanely self-conscious and self-important. I've always felt I was going gropingly into the future." Yet The Stranger's Child, with its wider canvas, excavation of the past and rumination on whether we can ever really establish the truth, does mark a new chapter. It may not be Middle Hollinghurst, in the sense in which James would have understood it, but it is the work of a middle-aged writer, whereas the four earlier novels were the work of a younger man galvanised by his arrival in London and by exposure to a suddenly more assertive gay world after 10 years doing EngLit at Oxford in the 70s. If, as Schopenhauer said, the first 40 years of life supply the text and the next 30 the commentary on it, Hollinghurst, at 57, is now well into the latter.

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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? Will is a member of the Corinthian Club (‘the Corry’) at which he swims, exercises and cruises men. The Corry is in no formal sense a gay club, indeed it is made clear that there are non-gay members, but there is a pervasive homoerotic atmosphere. Will continues reading Charles's diaries. On the way to a boxing club financially supported by Nantwich, Will has an unpleasant encounter with a working class boy, who offers him sex for money. Will refuses; there are undertones of fear and violence. I couldn't have asked for more, really, and feel so proud that readers are continuing to discover it and recommend it far and wide. 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."