Swimming of the Deer : Martin Firrell Company Ltd : 9781912622283 : 18 May 2020 : 'A strange, yet strangely believable world.' TIM PEARS A haunting rites of passage story. A Queer fable with a generous gothic heart. England, 1956. In a small rural community on the brink of change, a schoolboy is at war with his own body. What will it take to fulfil his misbegotten destiny? Guiding his hollowed-out mother towards the idea of happiness? Victory in the Scramble, a brutal 'chariot race', a metaphor for the futility of existence, and the youth's best chance of knowing who he can be? How will it end? Under the famished eye of the narrator, for whom the young Davy James is already the focus of forbidden desire.