Swimming in Air

"An unexpected encounter can shape a lifetime. Where Swimming in Air begins does not prepare us for how it ends. Read it for its honesty, for a taste of foreign lands, or for the love story." Susan MacDonald, Founder, Printers Inc, Palo Alto's legendary independent bookstore A chance meeting. A stranger's kindness. Help you can never repay. Neither of them was looking for any of it. It found them anyway, once they began listening to their lives. A physicist who believes love is a myth. A linguist who has watched the men in her family leave. They agree on one rule: careers first, no commitment. Then comes Africa. Cairo to Cape Town in 1987 on twenty dollars a day, with a backpack apiece and no plan past the next border. No GPS, no internet, only telexes and a guidebook. A park ranger on Mt. Kenya assures them that the lion that ripped through their friends' tent was simply confused. Their friends were inside. A soldier with an assault rifle, who looks about fourteen, studies her passport upside down. A man crouches by the roadside for hours, "visiting his sister" in spirit. He sometimes comes back with fine gossip. Their agreement starts to unravel. In Malawi, she sends him away to London for a job that wants him more than he wants it. She stays behind, alone in a tent, with sixty dollars and a bank transfer that hasn't arrived. Then she gets malaria.