• “Exhilarating… Searing… Her stories brim with piercing vitality and clear-eyed believability.”

    — Washington Post

    “As audacious, imaginative and poignant as any of her previous work.”

    — Miami Herald

  • Swim Back To Me

    A collection of burnished, emotionally searing stories, framed by two masterfully 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 impending fatherhood. And, in the masterful opening novella, two teenagers from very different families forge a sustaining friendship, only to discover the disruptive and unsettling power of sex.

    In these stories, Ann Packer explores the moral predicaments that define our social and emotional lives, the frailty of ordinary grace, and the ways in which we are shattered and remade by loss. Swim Back to Me is a work of shimmering psychological precision, unfailing intelligence, and page-turning drama.