I first met Bill Broady in the late winter months of 1998. He was lodging in the Frizinghall attic of the Bradford poet and poetry-publisher David Tipton, editor of Redbeck Press.

Tipton mentioned that his tenant-friend Bill had written a short novel which he had read and thought "an absolute cracker".

Next thing I knew, Broady was considering publishers. He settled for a book deal and a five-figure advance from Flamingo, part of Harper-Collins.

The manuscript eventually became a beautifully-produced paperback, advance copies of which were greeted with great enthusiasm by young female writers such as Emily Perkins and Julie Myerson. Suzannah Dunn proclaimed Swimmer: "The best book I have read all year."

Praise can be off-putting in advance of reading. Three hours after I had finished reading Swimmer I decided that the praise was merited. Swimmer is cleverly constructed and has an artful symmetry - the main character's autobiography is 135 pages, the same length as the novel. But it is also written with feeling.

By means of the second person, an unusual stylistic device for a first book, we are plunged into the mind of an unnamed young woman, a Commonwealth Games swimming gold medallist whose fame proves to be as brief as her one moment of real happiness, the moment in the pool when she feels that she's winning her championship race to repair all the broken lives around her.

"You felt as if you were swimming to save them, to make everything all right for everybody. Swimming for Dad to let you sit on his knee again, for Mum to pour her gin away, for Tom to kiss you and for Coach not to, for Karen to be well again, for Waterloo Station to be cleared of police and thieves. It wasn't, like Dad had said, 'all for nothing', but for everything, for everyone."

That's Broady at his best, all the cleverness of his eclectic and unusual mind subsumed by the thrust of the story, the plight of his lonely swimmer. It's a lovely piece of controlled emotion, and there are other passages like it throughout the book.

After the high of winning gold the fall is rapid. Like a fish out of deep water, the swimmer founders in the shallows of TV celebrity and modelling where everybody tries to get their hooks into her.

As the book progresses the distance widens between the swimmer's notion of who she is - if she ever really knows - and what she becomes. The gestures she makes at the world show her to be like the swimmer in the famous Stevie Smith poem - not waving but drowning.

Bill Broady said: "Originally, Swimmer started out as three poems. One day I was walking on Hampstead Heath with a terrible hangover and realised it was one project. Then it took me four months to do it - 30,000 words - very fast for me. I wrote it in Bradford."

He added: "The three poems were written in the vocative, the second person. I intended to change it, but when I re-wrote it I couldn't. I feel it's someone else, not me, addressing my heroine.

"She was sparked off by a real person. My friend had been a successful international swimmer and after she retired her life was an anti-climax. I showed the manuscript to her. She said: 'You didn't use anything I told you; you used what I didn't tell you'. What she meant by that was that I had got the feel of it. From that it became a work of fiction."

Bill Broady is 45, an unusually late age to be publishing a first book, at least in youth-conscious Cool Britannia. In fact he's been writing for years.

"I had a mass of stuff - four novels and a massive prose poem, but for me they were never realised enough. I didn't want to have work published that sounded like someone else. I always knew there was some work I had in me; I could see the hazy horizon up ahead: it was just a matter of keep tracking it until I got there.

"I don't try to write for a particular age group: I try to write for everybody. If you write with real enjoyment and passion I think people will respond; they want to read good stuff."

In my judgement Swimmer is very good stuff. What other stuff does Mr Broady have swimming around in his brain?

"I have just finished putting together a collection of 13 short stories - A Tale of the Golden Bathtaps - which may be out by next January. I'm also working on a novel set in and around Bradford and Colne about the rise of the Independent Labour Party, which refers to real historical figures - Fred Jowett, Philip Snowden, the first Labour Chancellor, and Victor Grayson.

"The working title of the book is The Night Soil Men. That could take another 18 months to complete," he said.

l Swimmer is published by Flamingo at £9.99.

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