NOTHING TO HOLD
The first rule of open-water swimming is that you may not hold on to anything: not the boat, not the crew, not another human being. Touch somebody, and the...
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NOTHING TO HOLD by Julian Ashvale is available in the Ebokio digital catalog as an EPUB ebook.
Price: £7.90. Language: English. Categories: Romance.
The first rule of open-water swimming is that you may not hold on to anything: not the boat, not the crew, not another human being. Touch somebody, and the swim is over. Tilda Ouellette has never had trouble with that rule.
Nineteen point two miles of freezing water separate the working harbour of Harrow Neck from the sixty-one people who still live on Vesper Island, and in eighty years only six swimmers have crossed it. Tilda is one of them. Nobody has ever swum it both ways.
She works nights at her father's ice plant, she has four thousand dollars of debt nobody knows about, and she has one summer left to try — because on the first of October the strait is sold to a sponsor and no independent swim will ever be recognised again.
For any of it to count, one man has to sit in a chair on the back of a lobster boat for twenty-two hours and sign a piece of paper.
Kieran Voss was the most famous cold-water swimmer alive until the night he was pulled out of these same waters, one point nine miles from the end, on the order of an observer who happened to be Tilda's mother. He has not swum since.
He runs the island mail boat, he says no to everybody, and he is the only accredited observer on this coast. He also cannot be anything to her but a signature.
An observer who cares about a swimmer is not an observer — that is a rule too, and it is printed, and the woman who runs the Association has read it. Twice an hour, for ninety seconds, a swimmer in the dark is permitted to speak to the boat. It turns out that is enough.
*Nothing to Hold* is a slow-burning, salt-stung love story about ambition, cold water, and the difference between being rescued and being helped — for readers who want a heroine whose ambition is never a phase, a man who is withheld until the very last minute, and a small coastal town that will stand on a granite breakwater all night with its headlights on for somebody it will never say it loves.
Read the last forty miles with something warm to hand. Then come back and tell somebody else where the light on the breakwater comes from.
Book details
Details: 270 pages, about 75,512 words, published by Julian Ashvale, publication date 9 September 2026.
Estimated reading time: about 5 hours.
Format, language, and reading
NOTHING TO HOLD is delivered as an EPUB ebook in English, and reads on phone, tablet, or computer through the Ebokio web reader with no app to install and no DRM.
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