When Will Kaplan meets Sean Paris, he is gripped by what he recognizes as desire and by what he senses is a shared affliction of the heart - the unshakeable memory of lost love. For it has been ten years since the love of Will's life disappeared during a night swim in the Pacific, off the Santa Barbara coast, and Will still doesn't know if Chad was swallowed up in the wake of a passing barge or took that moment of confusion as an opportunity to abandon Will at sea.

Now, on the edge of another ocean three thousand miles away, on the day of the Fire Island Morning Party, Will and Sean begin to wrestle with their ghosts and to weave themselves into a new embrace of intimacy. They plunge through the shadows of AIDS, the networks of mutual, ill-wishing friends, and the structures of gay life in New York City, both forward into their all-consuming affair, to the place where the real dangers lie, and back to the safer shallows of their past.

What Will learns about Sean - and discovers about himself - carries him through the tides of love and obsession, loss and discovery. In Nightswimmer, Joseph Olshan has crafted a lyrical and complex work of fiction, bringing his widely acclaimed narrative talent to a story that is at once masterful and mature, intensely passionate and deeply affecting.