In this exceptional and joyous memoir, Brigid Lowe swims her way back to life by seeking to plunge into every one of Scotland’s thirty thousand ice-cold lochs.

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.   Her debut novel, The Bloody Branch, the first in a sequence of retellings of the founding Welsh myths of the Mabinogion, will be published by Harvill (PRH), in January 2026.