Ann Packer

Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome acclaimed short story writer and bestselling novelist ANN PACKER as she reads from her latest work, Swim Back to Me.

Swim Back to Me is a collection of burnished, emotional stories, framed by two unforgettable linked narratives that express the transformation of a single family over the course of a lifetime.

A wife struggles to make sense of her husband’s sudden disappearance. A mother mourns her teenage son through the music collection he left behind. A woman shepherds her estranged parents through her brother’s wedding and reflects on the year her family collapsed. A young man comes to grips with the joy—and vulnerability—of fatherhood. And, in the opening novella, two teenagers from very different families forge a sustaining friendship, only to discover the disruptive and unsettling power of sex.

"Packer doesn’t rely much on dialogue. Her characters are revealed more by the glances they exchange, the comments they don’t make, the silences. And because her subject matter is family and absence and loss, the fill-in-the-blanks technique works audaciously well.... Packer can compress a lifetime of hope and sorrow in a short story, and in a brief paragraph can suggest the unspoken language of marriage and family." —The Miami Herald