The book opens and closes with swims spanning three years in Aotearoa New Zealand. Between them are visits to rivers, pools, and beaches around the globe, from the Peruvian Amazon jungle to the Sonoran Desert in the United States. Embedded within each story are the narrator’s layers of memory, as well as some luminous literary discussions. In addition to two short concluding pieces, the book features fifteen essays, thoughtfully and effectively arranged into six sections. Their shrewd arrangement supports the making of a collection whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Horrocks’s previous publications include a travel memoir, a book on women wanderers of the Romantic period, and an anthology about place. In Where We Swim, she explores mobility and emplacement with equal verve. She articulates a multiple belonging that reminded me of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s concept of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ – global citizenship not as a substitute for local identity but as its complement.

Family relationships ground and shape Horrocks’s sense of her place in the world: we meet her partner and twin daughters, with whom she travels, her overseas brothers, whose divergent lives she visits, and her ageing parents and in-laws. But amid moments of joy, ecological concern looms. For Horrocks, ‘the feel of the planet was shifting, and along with it, my always provisional sense of what it means to be alive in the world, as a grown-up daughter, a sister, a partner, a mother, and human animal living alongside other animals’.

The essay ‘The Whale’ is a particularly meaningful exploration of the human relationship with the ‘non-human animal world’. It follows the arrival of a southern right whale in Wellington Harbour during Matariki, the Māori New Year. For Horrocks, the whale’s visit raises questions about ‘ways to inhabit this place as Pākehā’ and the importance of recognising Indigenous perspectives.

Each essay comes with its own set of preoccupations, with the narrator gently but insistently unpacking the complexity of her experiences. In the Amazon, it is the exploitation of native animals for the benefit of tourists – an issue inseparable from the inequality of global wealth distribution: ‘high-wire ziplines and boat rides and caiman feedings [were] all carefully orchestrated to give the feeling of experiencing danger up close, while just a jolt away, out of sight, there was real danger, real loss’. In an Arizona hotel spa, under ‘their own piece of rented sky’, it is the disjuncture between how we live and how we ought to live. Horrocks contrasts the changes we know are necessary for a sustainable future with the inertia of our pre-programmed existence. Horrocks probes our reluctance to act. Why, despite our knowledge, haven’t we been changing? What will it take to make us change? In Perth, a visit to Rio Tinto Naturescape – a playground conceived, according to its website, in response to the question: ‘How can we expect children to care for something they have never experienced?’ – is juxtaposed with the Extinction Rebellion protest Horrocks’s family pass to get to the playground.

In Sussex, Horrocks excels in evoking a sense of interconnectedness through the spatio-temporal aspects of place-memory. She draws on the writing of eighteenth-century poet and novelist Charlotte Smith, whose work is ‘not so different from twenty-first-century writing about place by writers like Robert Macfarlane and Kathleen Jamie’. Here, fossils of seashells on cliff tops tell ‘of a porousness between places and times and people, as well as between any moment in one’s life and any other’. For Smith, ultimately, ‘any place is at once local and global, defined not by its boundaries but by its links to elsewhere’.

With the climate crisis underscored in Where We Swim, and air travel a condition for four of its six sections, a topic I missed in its pages was flygskam (Swedish for ‘flight shame’). Experts cite air travel as the most carbon-intensive activity an individual can undertake, so a discussion of flying as a travel mode feels pertinent to a work that combines travel writing with nature writing. It is mentioned briefly in the final pages: ‘Every time I heard someone in Europe or North America announcing they will no longer fly so as to avoid the carbon emissions, I thought of the distance between here and there.’ Because the narrator is intelligent and thoughtful, her concern for the planet profound, and her powers of inquiry significant, this reader (who shares her global outlook and an intercontinental family) hoped for a fuller exploration. (Of course, Covid-19 has made it irrelevant, for now. Horrocks observes: ‘It is seeming possible that the age of diasporic family connected by cheap ocean-crossing travels may be over.’)

Horrocks’s generous, searching narration makes for excellent company over the course of two hundred pages. By incorporating the ‘messier’ lives within which her swimming takes place, she has created in Where We Swim a work of wondrous depth, as she dives ‘out into the future of my life, of my children, and of this watery planet’.