The Ladies’ Midnight Swimming Club

by Faith Hogan

I found this book quite by chance recently. I’d just read a book that needed a lot of concentration so wanted something I could just pick up as and when, and enjoy it without thinking too much.  This book fulfilled that wish and kept me entertained from start to finish.

It is a very gentle story about the power of friendships, living life to the fullest and overcoming adversity. It focuses on three women who live in the seaside village of Ballycove, Ireland. It is a small place where everybody appears to know everything about everybody, but it has a strong community feeling.

Elizabeth hasn’t had a great life. She was married to the village doctor and discovered once he died that he had left her with crippling debts. She is quiet, gentle and dutiful but as we learn more about her, we discover the challenges Elizabeth has faced throughout her life and the trauma she has endured. We also witness her becoming a new, vibrant, confident woman through her relationship and friendship with Jo and Jo’s daughter Lucy.

Jo has lived all her life in Ballycove and is a loved and respected member of the community. It is she who sets up the Ladies’ Midnight Swimming Club, embracing the freedom that swimming in the freezing sea gives her.  Jo is happy and enjoying life when she receives news that will change everything.

Lucy has been working in a busy Dublin hospital and is burnt out. Recently single after her husband left her for another woman, she returns to Ballycove and her mum, along with her resentful teenage son. She has big decisions to make and her stay in Ballycove is only meant to be temporary when events happen to make this change.

Along the way we learn more about Lucy’s son Niall and Dan who has just lost his high-powered Job. He flees to Ballycove for peace and quiet to supposedly work on a novel but Dan has a massive secret. Will he ever discover what he needs to? Will his book ever be written and published? And where does he fit in with the Ballycove Ladies?

The Midnight Swimming Club is a place where the ladies can be open and honest with each other under cover of darkness and in the freezing waters. Here they laugh, they cry and they wash away their tears but ultimately, this book is a feel good, lift you up kind of book. It is a book about the importance of friendships, women supporting each other and facing adversity with courage.

I really enjoyed the story and could imagine it as a film, one that you would go along to with a group of female friends. Faith Hogan is not an author I have come across before, but having read this book, I would be more than happy to check out some of her other novels.