Ingrid Horrocks had few aspirations to swimming mastery, but she had always loved being in the water. She set out on a solo swimming journey, then abandoned it for a different kind of immersion altogether – one which led her to more deeply examine relationships, our ecological crisis, and responsibilities to those around us.

Where We Swim ranges from solitary swims in polluted rivers in Aotearoa New Zealand, to dips in pools in Arizona and the Peruvian Amazon, and in the ocean off Western Australia and the south coast of England.

Part memoir, part travel and nature writing, this book is about being a daughter, sister, partner, mother, and above all a human being living among other animals on this watery planet.

Endorsements and Reviews

‘Entering the deep waters of Where We Swim is to become completely immersed in the interconnectedness of life. The words in these pages are at once intimate and all encompassing, grimly funny and heart-wrenching, human and nonhuman, global and everyday. There is a breathlessness to these meditations – just when we think we might drown in one of the stunning revelations that seed this work, Horrocks is there showing us how to swim. This is a book for our times: to be read immediately, and again and again, as Horrocks helps us to come to terms with the new now.’ —Laura Jean McKay, author of The Animals in that Country

‘Where We Swim is a book about family that travels by water in the body of a swimmer. Horrocks is someone with an appetite for adventure but she is also the mother of young children and daughter of older parents. She brilliantly contrasts heady plunges of bodily experience with chilling alarms about family. This book is filled with wanderlust, but also homesickness for a past when our waterways didn’t have high coliform counts and Wellington’s bays weren’t soupy with saIp, and for the whole swimmable world it so vividly remembers.’

—Elizabeth Knox, author of The Absolute Book

‘Where We Swim captures the sense of uncertainty any swimmer feels when they step into unknown waters and Ingrid Horrocks' words carry us on a powerful current – sometimes gentle, sometimes urgent – of concern for our planet and joy at its beauty.’

—Sophie Cunningham, author of City of Trees

'Graceful and rhythmic, Where We Swim is an immersion in the waters of home and far away.’ 

—Inga Simpson, author of Understory,  

‘At a time when we can’t travel very far from home, let Ingrid Horrocks take you to bodies of water across the world…Energising, informative and often darkly funny, the tales of adventures in Where We Swim are accompanied by a grasp of relationships that feels relatable and true – the closeness and distance of Horrocks’s family is expertly drawn and incredibly moving…. A gentle joy to read.’

—Stella Charls, Readings Books

‘an absorbing exploration of water and self, immersing the reader in powerful currents, still waters, rivers, pools, and the ocean. An exquisitely written piece of armchair travel about swimming solo … and with others.'

—Cheryl Akle, Notable Books, The Australian

‘the antithesis to environmental writing fashioned by singular men tramping through a purported “wilderness.” By knitting together her book through family relationships, Horrocks reminds us of the connections with our non-human kin.’

—Jessica White, The Saturday Paper

‘engaging and layered…. explores mobility and emplacement …. articulates a multiple belonging that reminded me of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s concept of “rooted cosmopolitanism” – global citizenship not as a substitute for local identity but as its complement. … luminous…

Horrocks’s generous, searching narration makes for excellent company... By incorporating the ‘messier’ lives within which her swimming takes place, she has created in Where We Swim a work of wondrous depth, as she dives “out into the future of my life, of my children, and of this watery planet”.

—Naama Grey-Smith, Australian Book Review

'Where We Swim is a warm-hearted and intelligent book about swimming and waterways, and how family life enriches the meaning of our encounters with places, both new and familiar. Ingrid Horrocks is a wonderfully hospitable and perceptive writer who has the gift for combining her experiences with reflections that reach beyond them. Her stories embody the sensations of swimming beautifully and convincingly; the closeness and distances of family life are rendered just as strongly. The result is a book of meetings, one that seems to draw a map that many will recognise – of travels but also of the points where we re-evaluate where we’ve come and why.'

—Kári Gislason, author of The Promise of Iceland

‘a collection of fine-boned, intuitive essays set in the vicinity of water. There’s a whale in Days Bay; baby manatees in the Amazon; life and death on Waiheke; Horrocks’ two little girls desperate for a swim in Colombia; the impossibility of Phoenix, a city in the middle of a desert. I loved it. And it didn’t make me desperately sad, as I thought might be the case. More kind of … weightless.’

—Catherine Woulfe, The Spinoff

‘by moving from the local to the global to elsewhere, by embracing selves from different times, by signalling towards the new, better animals we could be, Horrocks shows us a personal whakapapa that reaches out in many directions, that carries stories from one place to another'.

—Claire Macintosh, New Zealand Listener

'Beautiful, surprising, mysterious, deep and reflective'

—Hannah Tunnicliffe, Kete, The Dominion Post, and stuff.co.nz

‘digressive, provocative and strangely compelling’

—Sally Blundell, Academy of New Zealand Literature & NZ Herald

‘This compression and layering of lenses does interesting things to language. Words wind up tautly when pressed against layers of ideas.’

—Nicole Walker, ‘Who Do We Talk To? Memoir's Multivisionary Perspective,’ Fourth Genre.

‘A self-described mediocre swimmer—”that kid at the back of the race who was more drowning than swimming”, an adult unsure of whether she could complete 200 metres freestyle—Horrocks’ mission might seem confusing. But this quest necessarily cascades into a complex series of questions: Where do we swim? Where don’t we, daren’t we, can’t we? And why/not? Part of the project, too, is disentangling and re-entangling various cultural understandings of water—Māori, ‘English’ and watery ways from further afield—and realising how being pinned to one can make you ‘feel joltingly bereft, adrift in place’. Instead, Horrocks yearns for unification, fusion, cross-pollination:

… ways of understanding to be in conversation with one another, so that I can learn from without claiming ownership of stories different from my own….

…. maternal passages abound: beautiful moments, memories of the ‘almost pleasurably primal’ responses to one’s children, their vulnerable, ‘pink-faced’ selves and needs…. These scenes capture enthralling themes within Horrocks’ work and worldviews: first, how our ‘fluid families’, and particularly children, force us to pay attention to different things, to adapt; and, also, how to reconcile the tensions of caring for one’s own family and protecting a wider sphere of life, including the entire global ecosystem.

Where We Swim joins a flotilla of beautiful texts on swimming’

—Emma Gattey, ‘Immersive Learning’, Landfall

A ‘terrific book’ ‘fantastic prose’ ‘several books in one…. a travel book, it’s a family narrative, and it’s a book about climate change’ ‘about things that matter. It’s a book that gets you both out of yourself… and deep inside yourself at the same time. It’s a book that makes you think about what kind of world do we live in, what kind of world do we want to live in, and what kind of world might we live in. A book of our moment.’

—Harry Ricketts, Radio New Zealand

Where to buy

Buy in New Zealand: Victoria University Press or your local independent bookstore

Buy in Australia: University of Queensland Press or your local independent bookstore.

Buy from elsewhere: From Victoria University Press