Title: The Dive from Clausen's Pier Author: Ann Packer Publisher: Piatkus/Hodder Sometimes in our lives we drive at cruise speed, coasting through what seems to be events already decided for us by expectations, relationships and society in general. If there's a faint niggling at the back of our minds that all isn't quite as peachy as it seems, we're quick to push the thought down especially if others have seen our discomfort and quickly acted to quash any sense of difference. But life has a habit of slapping us across the face, either with a giant fish, a la Monty Python, or with a turn of events that forces us to accept that life is different now and there's no going back. For Carrie, Wisconsin born and bred, her fish-slap happens when her fiancé Mike is paralysed after an accident during one of their now-traditional holiday picnics. As Mike struggles to regain consciousness and subsequently to deal with his body post-accident, Carrie reassesses what she wants from life, from Mike and from Wisconsin, and packs it all in, heading instead to New York and her future. But as anyone who has tried to run away knows, the past has a habit of catching up with it's own fish-slap. The Dive is Packer's first novel, but her short story collection and other publications have honed her skill at bringing life to characters, at giving them their own peculiarities and habits that make the reader feel so connected and intimate. Packer also has a tendency to lay magnificent spirals of prose out for us, such as "it seems to me that we learn each other in stages: facts first, meanings later, like explorers who stumble on to bodies of water without knowing at first whether they've encountered fog-shrouded rivers or vast oceans. We press on until we know, but as we go something is list: the new becomes old, and then taken for granted, and then forgotten." Carrie becomes a complete person, in Packer's hands, her reactions and choices alarmingly human. At almost 400 pages, The Dive is far from light reading. It is however an immensely satisfying and strangely touching novel. Though personally I was annoyed with the conclusion, it says much for the authors skill that I could immerse myself enough in the text to have such a response. The Dive from Clausen's Per then is a book that leaves an impression, one the reader can walk away from feeling as if they've grown or at least grown into lines like, "Lonely is a funny thing...it's almost like another person. After a while, it'll keep you company if you let it."