The Last Swim

A celebrated composer returns to her Wisconsin hometown to watch the municipal pool demolished — and refuses to let them play the elegy that made her famous. Faye Pahl carries a secret back to the summer of 1952, when polio stalked small-town America and a single act of childhood defiance shattered her family. Braiding the voices of parents, daughter, and a dying boy, this novel traces how guilt burrows into love, how music carries what words cannot, and how one family learns that forgiveness sometimes arrives decades too late — and just in time.