Swimming and other stories

By Bernard Steeds

"It's strange how life can turn on the smallest of things. An action or event that seems innocent at the time can lead to more than it should. For me, everything changed because of a feud with the boy next door, a rainstorm, and something to do with a fish pie."

"Yes, love is present in small details, but not the details you have shown. Love is in a splinter pulled from a wound, a glass of water fetched in the middle of the night..."

Swimming and other stories is the revised and updated first collection from multiple award-winning New Zealand writer Bernard Steeds. These ten tales range from the dirty realism of the New Zealand landscape to magic realist fables, from love stories to ghost stories to fairy tales and myths. Water features throughout, as a life-and-death force, a medium that connects and divides.About the author

Bernard Steeds is a fiction writer, journalist and researcher from Wellington, New Zealand. His stories have twice won the Sunday Star-Times short story competition, have won the At the Bay Katherine Mansfield Short Fiction Prize, and been shortlisted or commended in numerous other prizes including The Moth Short Story Prize. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals including The Penguin New Zealand Anthology: Fifty Stories for Fifty Years in Aotearoa, and The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Short Stories.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1067038442
• ISBN13: 9781067038441
• Release Date: February 2025
• Publisher: Laieta Press
• Length: 180 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.0" x 8.0"