Excerpt from The Three-Year Swim Club by Julie Checkoway, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The boy was smaller, weaker, and lived a life more deprived than any of his teammates. The story went that his father drank the family's money up; his mother beat both the father and the kid; and when the mother was tired of doing that, she beat the family's skinny pig until, one time, the thing collapsed right where it stood, dead, still tied up to a ragged rope. Sometimes the boy was so hungry he sucked on sugarcane for strength.

If Dick Keating or Ralph Gilman didn't do him in, then the Nat would surely do it for them.

Now, on their blocks, Keating and Gilman shook out their enormous arms and legs, and in imitation Nakama did the same. Keating and Gilman leaned down, and Nakama did, too, curling his toes over the edge of the block and locking his arms behind him as they did, in the pose that in those years was customary for swimmers to take before the starting gun. Across the pool, the boy's coach was watching carefully. No matter what the crowd thought of the boy now, no matter what the boy thought or doubted deeply in himself—the kid had come tonight to race with giants.



In his hand the Maui coach held a shiny stopwatch with which he planned to take the measure of his swimmer's pace and, in so doing, take the measure of a plan he'd hatched. A dreamer, the teacher had become possessed not long before of an idea of grand and possibly ridiculous proportion, and the race this night would be a test of whether he'd been right or whether he'd become a laughingstock back home.

His swimmer had no experience in a pool like the Natatorium or with men who were poised beside him now, world record holders, national champions, collegiate stars, Olympians. The boy's stiffest competition had been in local races with his own teammates and minor competitions with swimmers of his age back home on Maui. Recently, the boy had acquitted himself in a 440-yard event against a Honolulu college boy, and after he had done so, a few people, including the teacher, had sat up and noticed, Whether the boy's previous success had been a sign of talent or an accident of fate was what the teacher also wished to know this night, standing on the deck, listening for the pop of the starting gun, his finger poised upon the button on his stopwatch.

Excerpt copyright (c) 2015 by Grand Central Publishing.