He falls from the promenade and is taken to the hospital.

The story begins in Hadleigh where Gil thinks he sees his wife walking on the street below. That allows the reader to be introduced or reminded of 20 different books. The book in which they are placed is identified. Each is placed in a book for Gil to find.

We learn the characteristics of Ingrid's family and herself through these letters. The story alternates between the family as they live in the England of the present (2004) and the letters written by Ingrid in June of 1992.

Quote: 'Flora had forgotten her sister’s irritating habit of thinking of everything that anyone might require.' She does not give them to Gil but hides them in his books. For the month before she disappeared she wrote letters to Gil. Ingrid Coleman - missing for 11 years feared drowned. He LOVES used books, especially those with marginalia and the Pavilion is LOADED with these books. Gil Coleman - an aging author whose one book, Man of Pleasure, is so raunchy that he will not keep it in the house lest his daughters read it. The family calls it the Swimming Pavilion. Swimming Lessons - lessons learned while living in a renovated bath house. Scandalous and whip-smart, Swimming Lessons holds the Coleman family up to the light, exposing the mysterious truths of a passionate and troubled marriage. But what Flora doesn't realize is that the answers to her questions are hidden in the books that surround her. Flora, who has never believed her mother drowned, returns home to care for her father and to try to finally discover what happened to Ingrid. Twelve years later, Gil thinks he sees Ingrid from a bookshop window, but he's getting older and this unlikely sighting is chalked up to senility. When Ingrid has written her final letter she disappears from a Dorset beach, leaving behind her beautiful but dilapidated house by the sea, her husband, and her two daughters, Flora and Nan. Ingrid Coleman writes letters to her husband, Gil, about the truth of their marriage, but instead of giving them to him, she hides them in the thousands of books he has collected over the years. From the author of the award-winning and word-of-mouth sensation Our Endless Numbered Days comes an exhilarating literary mystery that will keep readers guessing until the final page.

Swimming Lessons by Claire Fuller