Damascus, one hot night in the early 1980s. A man clasps his baby girl to his chest; a car bomb has just killed her mother nearby. The man, an American secret agent, turns his newborn child over to the Swedish embassy. Thirty years later, that child is now a career woman: Klara Walldéen has been raised by her grandparents in a remote Swedish archipelago. She now lives in Brussels, where she's a high-profile assistant to an EU Parliament member. Her life runs along smoothly until the moment that, thanks to her ex-boyfriend Mahmoud, she comes across sensitive information about torture at American black op sites and is soon considered a terrorist herself. Klara is hunted by agents willing to eliminate to cover up the information in her possession. Meanwhile, across the globe, a man in flight from his own past as an agent so devoted to the cause to abandon his own child, now looks forward to swimming in the local pool and not much else. But on Christmas eve, it will be this man who tries to save Klara, herself on the run from one end of Europe to the other, from certain death.

Joakim Zander (1975, Stockholm) was raised in Söderköping, not far from the islands he describes at the end of The Swimmer, and later in Syria and Israel. He was a high-school exchange student in Washington, D.C. and then, after completing his military service in the Swedish Navy, he studied law at Uppsala University and in Holland, at Maastricht University. Cambridge University Press published his dissertation, which was awarded the Rabobank Prize. Zander went on to work for the European Parliament and the European Commission in Brussels. A lawyer by day and a writer by night, Zander sold The Swimmer, his debut novel and a best-seller in Sweden, in over 20 countries around the world. Joseph Finder, author of Suspicion, considers this book "An impressive and memorable work, comparable to the best of John le Carré."