This Is Not a Novel by Jennifer Johnston

'A fine drama of family relations, chiselled from the bedrock of twentieth-century Irish history' Irish Times
The day she hears of Johnny's disappearance is one that Imogen blackens from her life, for how could such a brilliant swimmer possibly have drowned? Imogen has so often watched her brother and his friend Bruno, the handsome young German tutor, slicing through the waters of the bay beneath the family house in County Cork, she can't believe all that vitality has gone for ever.
Nearly thirty years later, as Imogen slowly pieces together fragments of her family history, we hear the tragic echoes that connect her with the Great War and Ireland in the nineteen-twenties.