Shiver is a love-letter to Scotland – its flowers and rocks, myths and legends, highlands and islands – and to its chill waters, which swept Brigid off her feet only to carry her back home again.
Shiver by Brigid Lowe is a deeply atmospheric, non-fiction cold-water swimming memoir that chronicles the author’s quest to swim through Scotland’s wild waters following a personal life crisis.
This cold-water swimming memoir reveals surprisingly little about the Author, and perhaps this is the first time I’ve read a memoir with so little of the subject in it. But perhaps that’s the point. We get the very raw ins and outs of her life right at the start, and then we see her rise. This isn’t a chronicle of downfall, it’s the up.
This isn’t my usual read and whilst I love water & swimming, it generally doesn’t agree with me and my joint pains in England! But I was curious to read more about Scotland, a friend who enjoys wild swimming in Scotland often shares beautifully stunning pictures of the lochs that she finds and frankly, I’m jealous.
In England, lakes and rivers are fenced off. Wild swimmers scrutinise apps and pollution reports to work out exactly where they can go safely, often, nowhere. Our rivers are polluted, or owned, or both. In Scotland, you can go anywhere legally and… the water is clean. Imagine that.
So I really enjoyed reading this to understand more about the differences between two countries that share the same land and it was delivered in a poetic and at times lyrical way.
Final verdict: Shiver is a thoughtful, evocative and beautifully written book that will appeal particularly to readers who enjoy nature writing, travel memoirs and reflections on starting again after difficult experiences. Its greatest strength lies in Lowe’s ability to transform cold-water swimming into a meditation on belonging, freedom and the relationship between people and the natural world.
Recommended for: lovers of Scotland, wild swimming, lyrical prose and reflective memoirs.
About the Book
After Brigid Lowe’s life is upended, she turns to Scotland’s wild waters for refuge and for reckoning.
Drawn deeper by their bone cold comfort, she set herself a challenge: to swim a thousand lochs.And so her adventures begin: stepping into ice and caves and sacred springs, she swims with birds, conger eels and seals, in lochs held in dripping forest, towering mountains and ancient moor, alone and with her children in tow. Immersed in these secret pools, with their vaulting chasms and softer shallows, she tests the line between recklessness and safety, pain and pleasure – and, at last, life and death – discovering new depths of strength, endurance and fluent potential.
Shiver is a love-letter to Scotland – its flowers and rocks, myths and legends, highlands and islands – and to its chill waters, which swept Brigid off her feet only to carry her back home again.
About The Author
Brigid Lowe grew up in a remote Welsh-speaking community on Ynys Môn, with her younger sister and Irish immigrant parents. She now lives with her children in that part of Scotland known as Yr Hen Ogledd – The Old North – formerly joined with Wales in one Cumbric nation. She studied literature at Bangor, completed a doctorate at Oxford, and went on to teach and research at Sheffield and Cambridge Universities. Brigid traces her descent from travellers, circus performers, mill workers and gallowglass warriors. She takes photographs of flowers, forages her food, clambers pinnacles, and swims in ice and caves and bottomless pools.
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