Released 30th June, 2025 // 84 pages // 978-1-917617-15-4 // RRP: £12.99 / $17.99 / €15.99
 
Eva Aldea’s Forced Swimming Test is a fiercely intelligent, unflinchingly honest meditation on mental health, neurodivergence, and the uneasy interplay between personal distress and systemic forces. In four interwoven essays, Aldea interrogates the legacy of her father’s death and her mother’s suicide attempts, while navigating her own lifelong relationship with antidepressants and a late diagnosis of neurodivergence. Moving between personal experience, critical analysis, and philosophical inquiry, she scrutinises the ways in which suffering is medicalised, emotion is pathologised, and capitalism demands resilience above all else. This is a work of rare clarity and depth—rigorous, unsettling, and ultimately transformative.
 
PRAISE for Forced Swimming Test:
Offers a personal experience so unflinching that it will surely resonate for readers that identify and make them feel less alone.
— Adam Farrer
 
An honest, sometimes heartrending, exploration of neurodivergence, mental health and family that, for me, felt like a homecoming.
— Heidi James
 
In Forced Swimming Test, Aldea dismantles mental health discourse, institutional orthodoxy, and inherited damage. These formally ambitious essays don’t resolve — they echo.
— Fernando Sdrigotti
 
Aldea’s work, part memoir, part critical reflection, draws on her experiences of loss and grief, depression and neurodiversity to bring to light both powerful feelings and complex ideas. The book is moving, personal, clear-sighted and unsparing – but not without hope.
 — Robert Eaglestone
 
ABOUT Eva Aldea:
Eva Aldea is a writer and artist, lecturer and editor. Her first novel Singapore (Holland House Books, 2023), and her book in progress, Stockholm, explore migration and belonging. She has written about the experience of taking nude selfies as a way of exploring body image and the gaze in the pamphlet Possible Selves (Intergraphia Books, 2024). Eva is interested in the relationship between diagnoses, physical and psychological, and writing, and edits writers’ reflections on how these affect their craft on the website Dx: Diagnosis and Writing. Eva teaches literature, critical theory and creative writing. She is also freelance Editor in Chief at W.R.K.S Games.