A book about intense physical and personal experience, narrating how Victoria Whitworth began swimming in the cold waters of Orkney as a means of escaping a failing marriage.

Shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize 2018 . This is a memoir of intense physical and personal experience, exploring how swimming with seals, gulls and orcas in the cold waters off Orkney provided Victoria Whitworth with an escape from a series of life crises and helped her to deal with intolerable loss.

It is also a treasure chest of history and myth, local folklore and archaeological clues, giving us tantalising glimpses of Pictish and Viking men and women, those people lost to history, whose long-hidden secrets are sometimes yielded up by the land and sea.