Shiver: The Lessons of the Lochs

by Brigid Lowe

After Brigid Lowe’s world is upended, Scotland becomes her home. Its icy, wild waters a place of a visceral relief. Baptising herself into this new life, she determines to swim the country’s thirty thousand lochs. To plunge into this landscape in the hopes of gaining a fluid sense of herself and who she might become.

And so Brigid’s loch adventures begin: stepping into ice and caves and sacred springs, she swims with birds, conger eels and seals, across forest and mountain and moor, alone and with her children in tow. And as she comes to know these secretive pools, with their vaulting depths and softer shallows, she walks the line between recklessness and safety, discovering new edges of pain and pleasure, of strength and endurance.

Shiver is a love-letter to Caledonia – its flowers and rocks, its bogs and legends and hills – and to its chill waters, which swept Brigid off her feet only to carry her back home again.