What happens when you realise that you must change your life?
When – after years of hiding in routine, shrinking from opportunity, and sleepwalking through your days – you know you want more.
How do you remake your life without breaking it?
The Cure for Sleep is the stunning memoir of a smalltown wife and mother who returns from sudden near-death determined to live her second life on a larger, braver scale – whatever it takes, or costs.
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‘Tender and ferocious. The Cure for Sleep tackles perhaps the trickiest problem of all: how to live, fully and freely, while recognising the importance of home, family and enduring love’ The IPaper
‘A memoir that invites us to step out of the confines we have made. Every woman will see something of herself in it’ Mail on Sunday
‘A book about daring to head out, to encounter truths and to understand what place desire must have and must not have in a life. Beauty, pain and courage: all are here’ Adam Nicolson
A Journal of West Country Waters
by Lynne Roper
Wainwright Prize Longlist 2019
Edited by Tanya Shadrick
Set on Dartmoor and the Devon coasts, Wild Woman Swimming records the adventures of visionary wild swimmer and west country NHS paramedic, the late Lynne Roper.
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For five years, between surviving breast cancer and dying of a brain tumour in 2016, Lynne took daily swims in tors, ponds, rivers and reservoirs (sometimes in boisterous company; often alone, in quiet communion with nature)
‘Beautiful, ballsy, invigorating. Anyone who thinks Roger Deakin was wild will need to recalibrate’ Kate Rew, Outdoor Swimming Society
‘This is a tangible book as alive as weather…’ Jenny Landreth
‘Beautiful and inspirational’ Libby Page
Longlisted in 2019 for the prestigious Wainwright Prize for UK nature and travel writing, and recommended by the Outdoor Swimming Society, the book has an extraordinary backstory. Selkie Press founder Tanya Shadrick met Lynne Roper only once in the month before her death: a former hospice scribe and writer of the outside, Tanya recognised the power of her fellow west country woman’s writing about the natural world (and the close-knit communities that form when people gather together in our countryside) and committed to editing her work. This book is the result.
Lynne’s story inspires those who encounter it to seek for themselves the wild and free: it is a book for wild swimmers, walkers and nature lovers alike.
The story of Tanya and Lynne’s life-changing encounter is included in Tanya’s own book The Cure for Sleep.
“Why did wild swimming become so central to my life, so cathartic? I think it has to do with needing to feel alive. It’s a spiritual experience, sliding through wild water. Worries dissolve, my mind is liberated; thoughts flow and glide and play like dolphins. My soul swims wild”
Lynne Roper in Wild Woman Swimming
Tanya Shadrick 