The Ladies' Midnight Swimming Club

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He is an adoptee, raising in a loving home, but with so many unanswered questions as to who his mother was, and why he might have been given up for adoption.

The book is told between April and August, in five monthly parts and from Elizabeth’s, Jo’s, Lucy’s, Dan’s, and Niall’s points of view. Jo is a warm-hearted soul and she immediately senses that she needs to help Elizabeth and Lucy in anyway she can. Elizabeth has an epiphany when she begins to join Jo on her evening skinny dips in the freezing Irish Sea where they chat about life and support one another and soon Lucy joins the midnight swimming club too. Not quite true to list this as having been read as I gave up after 4 chapters, deeply irritated by the transparent plot and ridiculous ease with which the cardboard, stereotypical characters chopped and changed their lives.Faith Hogan knows her characters well, bringing them very much alive to the reader as we journey through the good and the bad times with them. After her husband's death Elizabeth discovers quite a few shocking secrets and just how much under his shadow she lived.

Lucy has realised life at present is not working for her and she welcomes a much-needed change of pace; her long nights at the hospital have meant she has little time to spend with her son, teenager Niall, who is unhappily attending boarding school. Eric was the local GP for a number of years, with Elizabeth and himself living in his rambling family home. Elizabeth is trying to pull her life back together after her husband dies, leaving her with his gambling debts, an old, large, expensive house, and a failing medial practice. The Ladies' Midnight Swimming Club is a heartwarming, uplifting and captivating character-driven piece of contemporary women's fiction and it is packed with so much heart and soul, humour and emotion.The setting is delightfully picturesque, with the golden sand beaches of Ireland’s west Atlantic coast, where a midnight dip in the frigid waters creates a bond and heals more than one troubled soul. The Ladies Midnight Swimming Club is a novel of empowerment and fulfilment, about facing life’s challenges head-on and of being willing to accept that there are certain aspects of life that are totally out of our control.

A story with a nicely woven plot and some wonderful highlights—the ladies swimming in the altogether at midnight is a vision of warm friendship and individual courage. Haunting and atmospheric, but real and authentic, with love and loss, humour and sadness, this poignant and thoroughly enthralling and captivating novel will completely draw you in. It also presents what he sees as the last chance to find the birth mother who gave him up thirty years earlier. Lucy, Jo's daughter, and her son take some time away from the city to go to Ballycove for a little holiday but destiny has other plans for them. She recently got divorced from her husband, Jack, and is still coming to terms with the fact that he has emigrated to sunny Australia and now has a new wife.Jo, a close friend of Elizabeth’s, persuades her divorced daughter and coincidentally a doctor to takeover the surgery until Elizabeth can move forward.