The water slurps my shoulders, torso, and back in a big, wet kiss, bending my image into an ironic clone of the truth. I bow to its dominance and let it break me open. The water alone will have me.

Watched obsessively by her guru-like coach, a nameless swimmer battles the element of water in a gruelling physical regimen. Outside of training, she floats loose in waters murky, salty, and chlorinated, engaging in aimless self-destruction, restraint looming just beyond her drifting hand. Incrementally, swimming is killing her; the pool is killing her. Hovering always nearby is a prickly vulture, waiting to feed on the swimmer’s remains …

Intense and immersive, Kiss the Undertow is a psychologically gripping account of endurance pushed to extremes.

Marie-Hélène Larochelle is Associate Professor at York University. Her research is about violence in contemporary French literature. She is the author of two scholarly books, L’abécédaire des monstres. Fragments de Réjean Ducharme (PUL, 2011) winner of Prix de l'Essai 2012. Société des Écrivains francophones d'Amérique, and Poétique de l’invective romanesque, L’invectif chez Louis-Ferdinand Céline et Réjean Ducharme (XYZ, 2008), finalist for Prix Raymond-Klibansky 2010. She is also the author of collective scholarly publications including Le Dire-monstre (Tangence, 2009), Identités monstrueuses : violences et invectives dans le roman francophone européen (Présence francophone, 2010), and Monstres et monstrueux littéraires (PUL, 2008). Daniiel et Vanya is her first novel, and her second novel, Cyan, will be published in 2020. She lives in Toronto.

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Michelle Winters is a writer, painter, and translator from Saint John, N.B., living in Toronto. Her written and visual work stretches the limits of the probable, explores the lushness of the industrial, and anthropomorphizes with gay abandon. Her stories have been published in THIS Magazine, Taddle Creek, Dragnet, and Matrix, and she was nominated for the 2011 Journey Prize. I Am a Truck is her debut novel.

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“Written in rhythmic prose that engages all the senses through thick description, Kiss the Undertow is as unrelenting as the narrator’s training … For fans of dark, atmospheric literature with a focus on difficult characters, Marie-Hélène Larochelle and Michelle Winters offer Anglophone readers a gripping novel in translation.” — Miramichi Reader

“Immersing the reader in a world where these horrors seem unrelenting, Kiss the Undertow delivers an unsettling and unflinching look at the complex reality of abuse and psychological control.” — West Trade Review