Books / Small Hours at the Baths
Small Hours at the Baths
Published 2021. A night attendant at an old public swimming baths, a woman who swims at five every morning, and the summer the council decides to close it.
Sale No sale from Today until No end date
A first name is plenty. Leave it blank for my signature alone.
Posted from Ibadan within two working days. Delivery prices are at the foot of every page; returns within 30 days.
Read the first pagesReading group guideEvery edition and other shops
Every edition
Paperback
ISBN 978-1-9990-4205-4
Published 3 March 2022
Ebook
ISBN 978-1-9990-4206-1
All the usual ebook shops
Audiobook
ISBN 978-1-9990-4207-8
Read by Femi Adeyemo; 9 hrs 5 min
Large print
ISBN 978-1-9990-4208-5
From libraries and to order
Also at your local bookshop, Hollin Street Books, Hatchway Books and Larkspur & Lowe; the ebook from Paperlane and the audiobook from Earshot Audio. Shop names are samples.
About the book
Dev Okafor has been the night attendant at Kelda Street Baths for six years. He mops the poolside, checks the boiler, and at five in the morning unlocks the door for Mrs Iris Bell, who is eighty-one and has swum forty lengths every day since 1962.
When a notice goes up announcing the baths will close at the end of August, Iris decides she will swim the Channel distance before the doors shut: twenty-one miles, in a twenty-five-metre pool, one small hour at a time. Dev decides, against every rule he has, to help her.
Small Hours at the Baths is a funny, warm and quietly furious novel about public places, private grief and the friendships that only happen when the rest of the city is asleep.
Reviews
“Utterly charming and secretly angry, which is the best kind of book.”
“Iris Bell is one of the great characters of recent fiction.”
“I laughed on the bus and cried in the bath. Appropriately.”
“A love letter to public places and the people who keep them going.”
The first pages
At four fifty-five Dev unlocked the side door and propped it with the yellow wedge, and at four fifty-eight Mrs Bell came up the ramp with her bag over her shoulder, the way she had come up it for longer than he had been alive.
“Good morning, Mr Okafor,” she said. She always called him Mr Okafor. He had asked her once to call him Dev, and she had looked at him as if he had suggested they swim in their clothes.
“Morning, Mrs Bell. Water’s twenty-seven.”
“Twenty-seven,” she said, approving, as if he had made it twenty-seven himself, which in a way he had, at two in the morning, with a spanner and some swearing.
The extract ends here. Buy the book
Reading group guide
Questions for discussion. The PDF has them all, with a note from me on how the book began.
- Why does Iris choose the Channel distance, and why in a pool rather than the sea?
- Dev keeps a rule book he never shows anyone. Which rules does he break, and which does he keep?
- The baths are almost a third character. What does the building mean to the people who use it?
- How does the novel use humour to talk about grief?
- Who do you think the anonymous letters are from, and when did you know?
- Iris swims at five in the morning. What do the small hours give the people in this book that the day does not?