The Lifeguard

In the town of Mission Hills, Michigan, an elementary school child drowns in the Olympic-sized pool at a summer swim club. By most, but not all, the lifeguard on duty that afternoon—a teenage girl who becomes the central focus of a town looking for an object onto which their fears and grief can be projected—is seen as responsible for the tragedy. In overlapping narratives, the truth about the drowning gradually surfaces, and the strange arbitrary but inexorable nature of fate is exposed.

Advanced Praise

“Flush with sensory details, the sprawling, immersive prose includes both extensive information on how a lifeguard wears her swimsuit and evocative active images…An intricate historical novel.”
—Booklist

“A description of one long, languid summer day is impressively prismatic, refracted through layers of history, perspectives, and distance. You can practically smell the Coppertone. Astute slices of Americana from an era of peak scientific progress make for nostalgic reading.”
—Foreword Reviews

“The Lifeguard is a wonder of a novel—taut, penetrating, immersive, but above all, deeply humane. Laura Kasischke centers her story on the same day as the launch of Apollo 11, and in her hands, what happens in the summer of 1969 to a small boy in a swimming pool and a girl on a too-big bicycle becomes no less profound and heart-gripping than a lunar landing. I was riveted and moved.”
—Meg Howrey, author of They’re Going to Love You

“Whirling backwards and forwards through time, and outwards into all of the lives touched by the loss at its center, Laura Kasischke’s The Lifeguard offers a dizzying, God’s-eye view of a human-sized tragedy. This is a gorgeously fractured, heartbreaking novel.”
— Kristen Roupenian, author of Cat Person and Other Stories