CANR
WORK TITLE: Twelve Post-War Tales
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CITY: London
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COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: English
LAST VOLUME: CANR 304
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PERSONAL
Born May 4, 1949, in London, England; son of Allan Stanley (a civil servant) and Sheila Irene Swift; married Candice Rodd (a writer).
EDUCATION:Queen’s College, Cambridge, B.A., 1970, M.A., 1975; doctoral studies at York University, 1970-73.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Worked as part-time teacher of English in Greece for one year and at Colleges of Further Education in London, England, 1974-83.
AVOCATIONS:Fishing.
MEMBER:PEN, Society of Authors, Royal Society of Literature (fellow).
AWARDS:Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award, 1983, for Shuttlecock; Guardian Fiction Prize and nomination for Booker Prize, both 1983, Winifred Holtby Prize from Royal Society of Literature, 1984, and Premio Grinzane Cavour (Italy), 1987, all for Waterland; Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (France), 1994, for Ever After; Booker Prize and James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Best Novel, both 1996, both for Last Orders; D.Litt. from University of East Anglia and University of York, 1998; Booker Prize longlist, 2003, for The Light of Day; Hawthronden Prize, 2017, for Mothering Sunday.
WRITINGS
Contributor of stories to the New Yorker.
Waterland was adapted for film by Peter Prince and released by Palace Pictures, 1992. Last Orders was adapted by Fred Schepisi for Sony Pictures Classics, 2002. Mothering Sunday was adapted to film by director Eva Husson and screenwriter Alice Birch for Lionsgate, 2021.
SIDELIGHTS
Graham Swift’s writing is so convincing that some of his devotees believe that he grew up in the Fens region of eastern England, the setting for his acclaimed novel Waterland, according to Maclean’s contributor John Bemrose. Swift is actually a native of urban London and the son of a civil servant. “For Swift,” wrote Bemrose, “the misconceptions about his origins only prove that he has done his job as a maker of fiction.” Swift told Bemrose: “I have enormous faith in the imagination. If your imagination cannot transport you mentally from where you are to somewhere quite different, then don’t be a novelist, be something else.”
[open new]Swift was born in the district of Sydenham, in southeast London, with the family later moving to Croydon. Pondering his journey to authorship in an essay for the London Guardian, Swift related: “The seeds of my desire to be a writer were sown in childhood. If it was no more at the time than an infant’s naive wish, it stuck and became lifelong. There were no writers in my family and I didn’t grow up in an environment that would have led me towards writing or anything artistic. My father was a minor civil servant in a dull office in London … a ‘pen pusher.’ In the war he’d been a fighter pilot. When my own puzzling urge to be a pen pusher of a different kind emerged he did not stand in its way.” Swift’s father had served in the Fleet Air Arm during World War II but rarely talked about it with his children. Swift followed his elder brother to secondary studies at Dulwich College, and he followed his dream of becoming a writer—nurtured further by the discovery of a collection of Isaac Babel’s stories while backpacking around Europe—to the English department at Queen’s College, Cambridge University. He proceeded to doctoral studies at the University of York, but he did not anticipate finishing his dissertation “The City in Literature”; he wanted to write fiction. Having met Candice Rodd, the English undergraduate and future writer who became his wife, at York, Swift withdrew to spend a year teaching in a language school in Greece and then enlisted as a teacher of O- and A-level English in London through the late 1970s. Not perceiving himself as “born a writer,” he worked at the craft until fairly mastering it.
About the significance of literature, Swift wrote in the Guardian: “I think fiction is fundamentally an act of sharing, of intimate human communion. There’s no limit to its intimacy, nor its candour. To be drawn into a story is like receiving an embrace, to know you are not alone.”[suspend new]
An author of novels, novellas, and short-story collections, Swift is perhaps best known for Waterland, which was published in 1984 and adapted as a feature film in 1992 starring Jeremy Irons, and for his Booker Prize-winning 1996 novel, Last Orders. His novels have a common thread running through them, as Cora Lindsay noted for Contemporary Writers: “Graham Swift’s novels deal with the extraordinary in the ordinary. In their settings, language and characterizations Swift’s novels are sparse and consciously drab. His protagonists are often ordinary men, middle-aged clerks or teachers or accountants. In their voices Swift ponders some of the bigger issues of life—death, birth, marriage and sex—as well as the everyday politics of relationships and friendships. His intricate narrative patterns raise questions about the relationship between personal histories and world events, between personal and public perceptions. He highlights the impossibility of creating a single objective reality, fictional or otherwise, and through fiction investigates the very nature of fiction.”
Swift’s debut novel, The Sweet-Shop Owner, was published in 1980 and concerns the memories and opinions of an industrious shopkeeper named Willy Chapman as he lives his final hours. Victimized by his marriage to “an insistently assertive shrew, a frigid near-hysteric who retreats into illness and invalidism,” according to Frank Rudman in the Spectator, and by an ungrateful daughter who refuses to visit him even long enough to collect her inheritance, Chapman finally closes his shop and heads home to die, reflecting on forty years of unhappiness and lack of fulfillment. Writing in the New Statesman and Society, Alan Hollinghurst called The Sweet-Shop Owner a “marvelous first novel,” and American critics seconded that opinion. Michael Gorra wrote in the New York Times Book Review that the work establishes Swift “as one of the brightest promises the English novel has now to offer.” Like other reviewers, Gorra noted similarities between The Sweet-Shop Owner and the writings of early twentieth-century Irish novelist James Joyce. “There is a touch of Joyce,” Gorra declared, “in … Swift’s revelation of the hidden poetry of small men’s lives.”
Shuttlecock, Swift’s second novel, is also an analytical tale about the past. The work’s protagonist is a police department archivist who scans records to discover possible connections between various crimes. Like all Swift’s protagonists, the archivist is obsessed with the past, particularly the life of his father, a former war hero in the French Resistance, once captured by the Gestapo and now confined to a mental hospital following his breakdown. Tension mounts when the archivist discovers evidence linking his father’s past activities with information missing from police files—information that suggests, according to John Mellors in London, “that Dad’s first breakdown had been in wartime, that he had betrayed other agents in the network, that his ‘escape’ had been set up for him by his captors as a quid pro quo.” The narrator destroys the file that might have answered this question without reading it first, so the mystery remains unresolved at the novel’s end. A reviewer for the Washington Post Book World, assessing both Shuttlecock and The Sweet-Shop Owner, stated that “Swift’s narratives twist and turn, knotting together inexorably the past with the present, sweeping us along steadily.”
Swift’s third publication was the short-story collection Learning to Swim and Other Stories. The eleven tales are mostly bleak and deal with themes from incest to infidelity, sexual trauma, and murder. Apparent in the stories are images that Swift also develops in his novels, with water in the form of rivers, streams, ponds, and oceans a paramount motif. Most of the tales are told in the first person.
Though the collection was not well received in the United States, in Britain reviewers praised Learning to Swim and Other Stories as insightful and provocative. Alan Hollinghurst, for instance, wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that Swift’s “concentrated, enigmatic stories address their subjects with such intelligent conviction and clarity that their ambiguities are … challengingly displayed.” Hollinghurst was especially impressed with “The Watch,” a tale about a family whose males are assured longevity by a magical watch, and “The Hypochondriac,” the story of a patient’s seemingly imagined—but ultimately real, and fatal—pains. “Swift’s ideas are large,” Hollinghurst observed, “but his manner is meticulous, orderly and attentive.”
With his next work, Waterland, which was nominated for Great Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize in 1983, Swift achieved prominence on both sides of the Atlantic. The novel is a complex, first-person account by history teacher Tom Crick, who relates his early romance, marital problems, and career difficulties all in obsessively analytical detail. Waterland begins with Crick recounting the discovery of a corpse in the Fens, a flat waterland where Crick’s father works as a lockkeeper. After this episode, the narrative shifts to an apparent classroom where Crick is discussing his dismissal from his teaching post. He reveals that his largely autobiographical lectures have prompted distress from school administrators, who urge him to resign. Crick also discloses that his life has been unsettled by his wife’s arrest—and subsequent commitment in a mental institution—for kidnapping a child.
Waterland shifts back and forth between Crick’s recollection of discovering the corpse and his account of his present private and professional difficulties. Interspersed among these autobiographical episodes are historical and philosophical analyses. Crick provides extensive background on the Fens and its inhabitants—past and present—while consistently debating the worth of this history. He acknowledges the possibly dubious nature of such history, yet he constantly returns to it as a means of explaining or understanding the present. The validity of history as a means of understanding the present is a major point of debate in Waterland, and one that provides much of the novel’s philosophical tension. Equally compelling, however, is the mystery of the corpse. As an adolescent, Crick discovers that a murder has been committed and that he and his family have been implicated. His detective work in identifying the killer—and his depiction of the sexual activities that prompted the murder—constitute what some critics consider the novel’s most dramatic aspects.
Upon its publication in 1983, Waterland was greeted enthusiastically by British critics and was considered among the year’s finest novels. The following spring, when Waterland was published in the United States, more reviewers hailed it as a wide-ranging, enlightening work. “Its textured descriptions of the English fens invited comparisons with Thomas Hardy,” explained Linda Gray Sexton in the New York Times Book Review. Michiko Kakutani wrote in the New York Times that Swift’s novel is “highly ambitious … a book that reads at once as a gothic family saga, a detective story and as a philosophical meditation on the nature and uses of history.” Michael Wood noted in the New York Review of Books that Waterland is “formidably intelligent,” and Charles Champlin declared in an appraisal for the Los Angeles Times that the novel “carries with all else a profound knowledge of a people, a place and their interweaving.” Champlin called Waterland “a fine and original work.”
Out of This World, Swift’s next novel, again closely examines the interplay between history and the present. The book consists of two interlocking monologues, those of former photojournalist Harry Beech and of his estranged daughter, Sophie. Harry’s dedication to photography—his photos of violence in war zones and elsewhere in the world are famous—contributes to the alienation of his daughter. At the beginning of the novel, explained Times Literary Supplement contributor Anne Duchene, “there has been no communication between them for ten years, since Harry’s father was blown up by a car-bomb and Sophie saw Harry taking photographs a moment later.” Now in his sixties, Harry works as an aerial photographer, trying to understand the acts of violence he has witnessed. Sophie, now married with two healthy children, lives in New York City, where she consults a psychiatrist to resolve her feelings about her father and herself. Eventually Harry writes to Sophie, asking her blessing on his remarriage, and she flies to England for a reunion with him.
The success of Waterland inevitably prompted critical comparisons with Out of This World. J.L. Carr, writing in the Spectator, called Waterland “innovatory, moving, memorable”; but, the critic wrote, “although I read [Out of This World] with ringing ears, I was not unsettled by its protagonists’ disasters. … Now and then, as the [father and daughter] pair tried to unload their little burdens of guilt upon me, I resentfully felt sorry for myself. What have they to complain about?” Duchene stated: “The writing … lacks the resonance of Waterland and the manic Kafkaesque energies of Shuttlecock. ” Readers, she continued, “might have wished to get more lift-off … from what we know to be the author’s powerful, annealing imagination. We ask a great deal of him only because of his past flights.” Sexton, writing in the New York Times Book Review, was more complimentary. “Swift’s achievement is that the important story of [Harry’s and Sophie’s] self-education has been told with such simple, startling beauty,” Sexton declared. “Not a book the reader is likely to forget, Out of This World deserves to be ranked at the forefront of contemporary literature.”
Ever After, Swift’s 1992 novel, is reminiscent of its predecessors in its examination of the effects of history and ancestry on people living in modern times. It is the story of Bill Unwin, an erstwhile university professor who has just gone through a traumatic period: within the past eighteen months he has lost his mother, his stepfather, and his beloved wife, an actress. Seriously depressed, he attempts suicide, and it is while he convalesces that he begins to tell his tale. It turns out that Unwin’s academic career was created for him—for many years he had been his wife’s manager, and his seat at the university exists only because his rich American stepfather established it with the provision that Unwin was to have it. Unwin occupies his time at the university by editing the papers of a Victorian ancestor named Matthew Pearce, whose faith was shattered by the death of his son, his reading of Darwin’s theories of natural selection, and his encounter with the fossil of an ichthyosaur on a beach in Dorset. Unwin is just as helpless to answer questions about Pearce’s life as he is to answer questions about his own: why did his father, Colonel Unwin, commit suicide? Was Colonel Unwin really his father, and did news of his wife’s supposed infidelity drive him to shoot himself? “A latter-day Hamlet,” stated Pico Iyer in Time, “Unwin is driven mad by the sense that all of us are playacting, adrift in a world of ‘suppose.’”
Like Out of This World, Ever After invited comparisons with Waterland. “It seems to be a convention that when you are writing about Graham Swift, somewhere in the first paragraph or two you refer to Waterland, ” explained Hilary Mantel in the New York Review of Books. “It would be a great thing to kick over the traces and declare Waterland a mere bagatelle beside Swift’s new novel; unfortunately, that is impossible.” “How could any comment more sharply irritate Graham Swift,” asked Michael Levenson in the New Republic, “than the cruelly recurrent, dully obvious opinion that neither his two novels written before Waterland nor the two written since even belong on the same shelf as that strong book?”
As was the case with Out of This World, reviews of Ever After were mixed. Iyer, for instance, referred to the novel as “a dense, literary text that race[s] ahead with the compulsive fury of a page turner.” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in the Washington Post Book World: “The multiple plot covers 150 years in 276 pages quite effortlessly, and though full of references, characters, events and second thoughts, it turns and doubles without confusion in time and space. It is masterfully done. Only it all seems, despite its dense, charged texture, a bit thin and arbitrary.” “The prose is rich, lush and unhurried,” declared New York Times Book Review contributor MacDonald Harris. “This is a modern British novel for the reader who is getting bored with the contemporary American mode of fiction and turns back, now and then, to [Anthony] Trollope, [Thomas] Hardy, or George Eliot.” Lorna Sage, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, also compared Swift to Hardy “in his insistence that the naive questions about extinction matter.” Mantel concluded that Ever After “may have deeply advanced Swift as a thinker, but sadly it has not advanced him as a novelist.”
Critical consensus changed with Swift’s 1996 novel, Last Orders. This work, which took Britain’s most prestigious literary honor, the Booker Prize, confirmed in many critics’ minds that the author had produced a worthy successor to Waterland. Last Orders, which takes place in the 1980s England of Thatcher and rising unemployment, follows four aging men as they journey from London to the seaside resort of Margate to deliver a fifth friend—recently deceased and now cremated—to that man’s requested resting place: scattered to the winds off the Margate pier. For these working-class characters, memories of glory days during World War II and the conflicts of wives and children in the present haunt them even as they recall the life of their lost comrade. “Little by little, a portrait of the man and his life emerges—petty, sad, frustrating,” an Economist critic stated. To Spectator writer Caroline Moore, “ Last Orders contains many of the devices, the themes and concerns we have met before. There is the interweaving of past and present, of people and places—a web of lives shaped by ordinary guilts, warped by small but painful betrayals.”
Noting that Last Orders includes a characteristic Swift plot twist whereby sons come into conflict with their fathers over career choices, Moore admitted that one “longs to know what [Swift’s] own father did, and what he felt about his son becoming a writer.” This psychology aside, Moore praised Last Orders as the work of “an intelligently subtle writer” who has created a story that “evokes a luminously complete and complex world.”
Calling Last Orders nothing less than Swift’s finest book to date, Oliver Reynolds in the Times Literary Supplement challenged those who would accord that honor to Waterland. To Reynolds, this “emotionally charged and technically superb” story “is a wonderful example of the novel’s power to resolve the wavering meanings of the life we all share into a definite focus, one where the clarity with which things are seen renders them precious.” Both Jay Parini in the New York Times Book Review and John Casey, writing in the Los Angeles Times, lauded Swift for his use of the rich British idiom in Last Orders. This “slangy, scrappy” vernacular, in fact, caught Casey by surprise: “I may have not caught every nuance with my American ear. I wish I could hear it aloud; this novel would be a wonderful book on tape with each character played by a different actor.”
Although the Booker judges recognized Swift’s novel with the 44,000-dollar first prize, controversy arose on the publication of Last Orders when reviewers compared the book’s plot and theme to As I Lay Dying, a William Faulkner work of the 1930s. An Australian academic accused Swift of plagiarizing Faulkner’s work, a charge that infuriated Swift. Swift said that while he acknowledges that authors are naturally influenced by each other, the idea of stealing was out of the question. Swift’s assertion was backed by the Booker judges, who agreed that no plagiarism took place.
Swift’s next novel, The Light of Day, concerns a murder and a love story. The narrative begins on the second anniversary of the crime; Sarah, the guilty woman, is being visited in jail by George, the man who loves her and who was acting as her private investigator when she killed her adulterous husband. While the storyline may conjure up a conventional detective story, The Light of Day is a unique book. “Swift has always combined narrative complexity—interwoven story lines and cunning shifts of perspective—with a perfect instinct for the moral and emotional plights that define us,” wrote Sven Birkerts in Books. Birkerts felt that The Light of Day follows this pattern, and “comes at us with the puncturing clarity of a siren in the night.” The real mystery to be solved is the motivations of the characters; as the book progresses, readers learn of George’s disgraceful dismissal from the police force and his own corruption. The book is “at once perfectly balanced and eerily incisive. It is also unexpectedly redemptive. By the end of the novel we have seen deep into the soul of George Webb. We may have visited a place of fear and terrible vengeance but we come away feeling that a searching beam has been thrown in another direction—toward the hidden sources of love and faith,” maintained Birkerts.
The Light of Day offers the hope that “even in the course of a single day, we are capable of remaking ourselves,” observed Bill Ott in Booklist, going on to describe the book as “a remarkable feat of storytelling by one of our most accomplished novelists.” Swift himself told Benedicte Page in Bookseller that he considers The Light of Day his most optimistic work. He explained: “George is a man who has found a new reason for living, and I think that’s important for us all to believe in, as life goes on, and as we all feel disappointments. For George it is a marvellous thing, and he knows it, and he is not wasting it.”
Swift’s novel Tomorrow is built around a woman’s anxious, sleepless night as she anticipates telling a long-withheld family secret to her sixteen-year-old twins on the following day. The woman, Paula, is an art dealer and the daughter of a High Court judge; her husband, Mike, is from a much more humble background and is now a successful editor and publisher. As she anticipates talking to her twins, Nick and Kate, Paula reviews her past: how she and Mike met and began their relationship, their marriage, her unfaithfulness, and the ebb and flow of their sex life.
When the secret is finally revealed, it may seem almost anticlimactic, considering the level of tension in the narrative, according to some reviewers. Michael Mewshaw, a writer for the Los Angeles Times Book, found that “although the narrator’s heavy-handed manipulation becomes annoying and her repetitiveness—frequent verbatim references to family history, treacly speculations about the children’s virginity—dins at the ear like a recorded announcement, the story has moments of charm and genuine tenderness.” Yet other reviewers, such as Alexandra Harris of the Oxonian Review, felt that the secret and its revelation were not the point of the book; as Harris wrote, Paula’s “work for the night is to piece together the slow, snailish histories surrounding the announcement to be made in the morning. Tomorrow is not Swift at the height of his powers, but it is a wise, humane study of those ‘patient cycles of experiment’ that lie behind decisive events, and the long lines of inheritance that make life-changing discoveries make sense.” A reviewer for Curled Up with a Good Book felt that “thematically the novel makes a powerful statement. Embedded within the narrative is a plea to live one’s life to the fullest, no matter how quick and rushing life may sometimes seem. … In languid and measure prose, author Graham Swift characterizes a loving, deeply intuitive marriage over the course of thirty years, ultimately infusing his tale with a worldly melancholy, albeit one that is also permeated with immense beauty, as well as the possibilities of great happiness.”
Swift’s first nonfiction work, Making an Elephant: Writing from Within, appeared in 2009, as the author turned sixty. Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Ron Carlson described Making an Elephant as “a compendium of picked-up pieces: meditations on the art of writing.” Carlson added: “This makes it a creature of many parts, like an elephant, and happily not all painted gray. The work here has been arranged in a loose chronology and forms a pastiche of literary notes: essays, interviews, memoirs and poems. There are even some photographs and drawings.” London Telegraph contributor Jasper Rees noted of this work: “An anthology of new essays and old, this is the closest Swift will stray to a memoir. Each piece is diligently introduced in the unassertive, even tentative style Swift reserves for nonfiction gigs.” Rees further noted: “The collection amounts to a patchwork account of a quiet writer’s engagement with the world outside.”
Swift begins the collection of essays with an early recollection of his boyhood in Croydon: “I have two memories of childhood which have become permanently entangled with each other. One is of being taken when I was very small to have my polio inoculation, an event anticipated with a mounting dread which the actual procedure did nothing to dispel. … I must have had my polio jab around Christmas time, because the second memory is of being with my mother in a Croydon department store where a lavish, glittery Santa’s grotto had been constructed. … The similarities were too vivid, the throwback to that hospital room too overpowering. If I had any plans for calling on Santa, they stopped right there.”
Thus beginning with memoir, Swift goes on to present essays detailing his middle-class upbringing in the London suburb of Croydon, his early desire to write, and the time he spent in Greece as a young man attempting to become a writer. One essay describes the events around the publication of his first story when he was twenty-seven. In the title essay of the collection, Swift recalls his relationship with his father. According to London Observer contributor Edward Marriott, in this essay Swift “describes a man of contrasts: the wartime fighter pilot who became a clerk in the National Debt Office, the model of anonymous commuter respectability.” Other essays deal with experiences with fellow writers: one details a salmon fishing expedition with poet Ted Hughes, another finds Swift out on the town with Caryl Phillips, buying a classical guitar with novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, or on a mission to Czechoslovakia during the Velvet Revolution to track down a missing writer.
Reviewers responded warmly to this nonfiction departure. Marriott felt that the collection is “revealing, self-deprecating, [and] full of fascinating details.” Carlson similarly wrote: “The elephant, the legend goes, was made of many parts by a committee. The same might be said of this book, in which Swift, a fierce first-rank fiction writer, offers us a collection of luminous moments that is more than the sum of its parts.” New Statesman contributor Leo Robinson also had praise for the collection of essays, terming it “a tender and admirable book,” while New York Times Book Review writer Jacob Heilbrunn called it an “evocative gathering up of [Swift’s] past.” Writing for London’s Sunday Times, Peter Parker observed that Swift is “quietly elusive” in real life, but in this book he “rewardingly places himself at the center.”
Swift published the novel Wish You Were Here in 2011. Jack Luxton is traveling to collect the remains of his brother, Tom, who died while fighting in Iraq. Along the way, he recalls their childhood on an English farm and also the sense of terror he has felt as the majority of people in his life have died over the past few years.
Writing in the Washington Post Book World, Ron Charles said that it might “sound like a novel that suffers from tedious repetition, but the story draws us forward by suspending the revelations that are haunting Jack’s thoughts. We work backwards, exploring the wound before discovering the cause.” Charles continued: “It doesn’t rest on one great announcement but on the accretion of a lifetime’s worth of little cruelties and subsequent tragedies that convey the intricacies of mourning, the capacity of sorrow to make us harm those we love. … And yet there are moments of plaintive comedy here, too, that render Jack’s distress all the more affecting.” Writing in Library Journal, Evelyn Beck described it as “a slow-moving but powerful novel.” Beck said that the novel is “recommended for fans of Ian McEwan, Michael Ondaatje, and Kazuo Ishiguro.” Booklist contributor Donna Seaman commented that “Swift tests ancient convictions about birthright, nature, love, heroism, war, death, and the covenant of grief.” Reviewing the novel in Spectator, Anthony Cummins mentioned that Wish You Were Here “is moving, engrossing, generally well put together, the stuff you want from a novel.”
In 2014 Swift published the short story collection England and Other Stories, featuring twenty-five stories told as first-person narratives. The characters offer perspectives on changes occurring in life in England, ranging from divorce and sexual awakening to death. Loneliness and family also feature prominently in many of the stories.
Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Michiko Kakutani suggested that “the most striking of Mr. Swift’s stories share qualities of unexpectedness and inevitability, underscoring the strange alchemy by which temperament combines with past experience and chance and sometimes impulsive choices to determine the shape of one’s fate.” Kakutani noted that “the lesser stories in this book are more synthetic affairs,” appending that “had such entries been left on the cutting room floor,” England and Other Stories “would have been a pensive, virtuosic collection. As it stands, it’s a lovely tapestry of stories with some unfortunate unraveled threads.” Reviewing the collection in the London Observer, Lucy Scholes noticed that “reduction in all its forms is something of a theme in Graham Swift’s collection, both in form and content.” Scholes reasoned that “as a collection, these initially disparate-seeming stories come together to build a coherent and cohesive whole.” In a review in the London Telegraph, Cummins explained: “The collection works best in the everyday here and now. Its rather grandiose title might be an attempt to confer dignity but it’s not needed. Swift could have called it ‘Mick and other blokes’ with no loss at all.” Reviewing the collection in Maclean’s, Brett Josef Grubisic opined that “a sense of dimming, of possibilities quickly shrinking, pervades the stories.”
[resume new]Swift’s novella Mothering Sunday follows twenty-two-year-old domestic servant Jane Fairchild via close third-person, stream-of-consciousness narration through a single day in the spring of 1924—Mothering Sunday, when domestic servants travel back to their homes and families. Thus do Jane and Paul Sheringham, his family’s sole surviving son, after the other two perished in World War I, enjoy a poignant opportunity to consummate their six-year affair not merely in the stables or the greenhouse but in his bedroom. Paul must depart their embrace, for the last time, they expect, to meet his fiancée for lunch. After lingering alongside Paul in the nude, Jane has the house and many memories to herself, unveiling aspects of her youth and the affair, while the narrator also gives glimpses into Jane’s future as a famous novelist, living a long and glorious life into her nineties.
A Kirkus Reviews writer deemed Jane a “marvelous” personality, alternately “wry, world-weary, innocent, or lusty” and calling to mind Molly Bloom of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The reviewer appreciated how Swift has “fun with language, with class conventions, and with narrative expectations in a novel where nothing is as simple or obvious as it seems at first.” In the New York Times Book Review, Sophie Gee—perceiving echoes of Joyce as well as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway—was impressed by the “vividly lost quality of the day” that unfolds: “The story has an unmoored, dreamy quality, which captures the way such days become lodged in the recollections of youth.” Gee declared that Swift demonstrates the “elegance and lyricism of high modernist writing” and affirmed that the “lush, sorrowful prose gives considerable pleasure.” The Spectator’s Ellah Allfrey remarked that as Mothering Sunday unfolds, the reader is in “sure and steady hands. … There is a lulling quality to the movement between sections of the book—rhythms and repetitions, the ebb and flow of a tide, the wearing down of rock to form sand on a beach.” Allfrey affirmed that Swift “achieves a delicate harmony between the cool detachment of the narrative voice and the intensity of emotion conveyed on every page. This is a rare read indeed.”
Swift’s next short novel is Here We Are, which centers on a trio gaining fame on the Brighton pier in 1959 with a dazzling magic act. Just as compelling are the interrelations between song-and-dance entertainer and emcee Jack Robinson, the dashing magician dubbed Pablo, and assistant Eve White. The lion’s share of the backstory goes to the magician, cockney Londoner Ronnie Deane, whose life trajectory shifted dramatically during World War II, when he was dispatched by his housecleaning mother to live with a fairly well-to-do childless couple in the countryside. Ronnie was guiltily fond of his foster mother and her characteristic brightly anxious remark “Here we are!” and moreover learned the fundamentals of sleight of hand from his foster father. Ronnie and Evie eventually became engaged, but half a century after their heyday in Brighton, Jack’s long career as a showman will be the one biographers are asking Evie about.
A Publishers Weekly reviewer reckoned Here We Are a “jewel of a novel ,” “saturated with images and metaphors that recur like melodies.” A Kirkus Reviews writer declared that the “hocus pocus of identity and destiny, how we become who we are and make the choices we do, offers plenty of surprise as well as revelation” in a novel that seconds the Shakespearean contention “that all the world’s a stage.” In the New York Times Book Review, Kathryn Hughes found the precarious-seeming pier where the magic act enjoys its flash of fame to be “classic Graham Swift territory, a place where the present always feels caught between a richer past and a featureless future.” Hughes greatly appreciated how, with this novel, Swift returns to the sort of narrative stylings—“flamboyant, luxurious, outrageous even”—that he “brilliantly” wielded in his “breakthrough magic realist novel” Waterland. Toward the end of Here We Are, “Ronnie pulls off one last, and quite staggering, illusion. Swift’s closing account of a mundane world momentarily pierced by a shaft of numinous mystery is magnificent.”
Swift returns to the short-story form with Twelve Post-War Tales, collectively set in the aftermath of World War II. Cross-cultural encounters, delayed reckonings, familial resolution, and nostalgic retrospection are at the heart of the stories. World Literature Today contributor Donald P. Kaczvinsky observed, “The title of the book hints at the complexity of Swift’s narrative technique. Calling these postwar stories ‘Tales’ implies light fiction or adventure stories, something Kipling may have written. … Yet in the best of these pieces, the ‘tales’ demonstrate Swift’s masterful ability to link the local and the global, the historical and the personal.” Spectator reviewer Leyla Sania observed that “these stories are very powerful and poignant snapshots.”[close new]
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 41, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1987.
Contemporary Novelists, 7th edition, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2001.
Swift, Graham, Making an Elephant: Writing from Within, Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2009.
PERIODICALS
Age (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia), February 8, 2008, Delia Falconer, review of Tomorrow.
Atlantic Monthly, October, 2007, review of Tomorrow, p. 138.
Book, May 1, 2002, review of Last Orders, p. 30.
Booklist, March 15, 2003, Bill Ott, review of The Light of Day, p. 1254; March 1, 2006, review of The Light of Day, p. 63; February 15, 2012, Donna Seaman, review of Wish You Were Here, p. 19; March 1, 2015, Donna Seaman, review of England and Other Stories, p. 17; April, 2025, Brendan Driscoll, review of Twelve Post-War Tales, p. 47.
Books, January 1, 1993, review of Learning to Swim and Other Stories, p. 18; May, 2003, Sven Birkerts, review of The Light of Day, p. 73.
Bookseller, December 6, 2002, Benedicte Page, review of The Light of Day, p. 35.
Buffalo News, June 8, 2003, Michael D. Langan, review of The Light of Day, p. F5.
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, September 22, 2005, James Acheson, review of Waterland.
Economist, March 28, 1992, review of Ever After, p. 101; March 16, 1996, review of Last Orders, p. 14; February 22, 2003, review of The Light of Day.
Entertainment Weekly, April 24, 1992, Mark Harris, review of Ever After, p. 63.
Europe, March, 1997, Claire Bose, review of Last Orders, p. 46.
Guardian (London, England), March 1, 2003, John O’Mahony, “Graham Swift: Triumph of the Common Man,” p. 20; March 8, 2003, review of The Light of Day, p. 9; April 5, 2003, John Mullan, “Last Orders Week 1, Dialogue,” p. 32; April 12, 2003, John Mullan, “Last Orders Week 2, Clichés,” p. 32; April 19, 2003, John Mullan, “Last Orders Week 3, Interior Monologue,” p. 32; April 14, 2007, Sophie Harrison, “Voice from the Street”.
Hindu (Chennai, India), February 7, 2008, Antara Das, review of Tomorrow.
Independent (London, England), April 15, 2007, Tim Martin, review of Tomorrow.
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2003, review of The Light of Day, p. 345; April 1, 2015, review of England and Other Stories; February 15, 2016, review of Mothering Sunday: A Romance; February 1, 2020, review of Here We Are; May 1, 2025, review of Twelve Post-War Tales.
Library Journal, January 1, 2002, Nancy Pearl, review of Last Orders, p. 188; March 1, 2003, Barbara Hoffert, review of The Light of Day, p. 120; September 1, 2007, Edward B. St. John, review of Tomorrow, p. 130; April 1, 2012, Evelyn Beck, review of Wish You Were Here, p. 74; May 1, 2015, James Coan, review of England and Other Stories, p. 68.
Listener, January 6, 1983, review of Learning to Swim and Other Stories, p. 24.
London, November 1, 1981, John Mellors, review of Shuttlecock, pp. 88-90.
London Review of Books, February 8, 1996, review of Last Orders, pp. 20-21.
Los Angeles Times, April 1, 1984, Charles Champlin, review of Waterland, p. 1; July 7, 1996, John Casey, review of Last Orders, p. 6; May 21, 2003, Scott Martelle, review of The Light of Day, p. E9; September 16, 2007, Michael Mewshaw, review of Tomorrow; July 19, 2009, Ron Carlson, review of Making an Elephant.
Maclean’s, May 6, 1996, John Bemrose, review of Last Orders, p. 61; June 1, 2015, Brett Josef Grubisic, review of England and Other Stories, p. 57.
Mirror (London, England), March 1, 2003, review of The Light of Day, p. 56.
Nation, March 31, 1980, Michael Gorra, review of Waterland, p. 392.
National Review, March 10, 1997, James Bowman, Last Orders, p. 58.
New Republic, June 22, 1992, Michael Levenson, review of Ever After, pp. 38-40.
New Statesman, February 17, 2003, review of The Light of Day, p. 53; April 23, 2007, review of Tomorrow, p. 66; April 6, 2009, Leo Robson, review of Making an Elephant: Writing from Within, p. 50; July 25, 2014, Erica Wagner, “Watching the English,” p. 68; August 21, 2020, Leo Robson, review of Here We Are, p. 50.
New Statesman and Society, April 25, 1980, Alan Hollinghurst, review of The Sweet-Shop Owner, p. 630; March 18, 1983, review of The Sweet-Shop Owner, p. 22; October 7, 1983, Marion Glastonbury, review of Waterland, p. 27; January 19, 1996, Ruth Pavey, review of Last Orders, p. 37.
Newsweek, April 30, 1984, Peter S. Prescott, review of Waterland, p. 74.
New York Review of Books, August 16, 1984, Michael Wood, review of Waterland, p. 47; June 11, 1992, Hilary Mantel, review of Ever After, p. 23; April 4, 1996, John Banville, review of Last Orders, pp. 8, 10.
New York Times, March 20, 1984, Michiko Kakutani, review of Waterland, p. 25; May 4, 2003, Anthony Quinn, review of The Light of Day, p. 6; June 24, 2009, Dwight Garner, review of Making an Elephant, p. 2.
New York Times Book Review, March 25, 1984, William H. Pritchard, review of Waterland, p. 9; June 23, 1985, Michael Gorra, review of The Sweet-Shop Owner, pp. 11-12; September 11, 1988, Linda Gray Sexton, review of Out of This World, p. 14; October 22, 1989, review of Out of This World, p. 38; March 29, 1992, MacDonald Harris, review of Ever After, p. 21; May 16, 1993, review of Ever After, p. 40; May 5, 1996, Jay Parini, review of Last Orders, p. 13; May 4, 2003, Anthony Quinn, review of The Light of Day, p. 6; October 7, 2007, David Leavitt, review of Tomorrow; August 23, 2009, Jacob Heilbrunn, review of Making an Elephant, p. 10; June 22, 2015, Michiko Kakutani, review of England and Other Stories, p. C1; April 17, 2016, Sophie Gee, review of Mothering Sunday, p. 13; October 25, 2020, Kathryn Hughes, review of Here We Are, p. 18.
New Zealand Herald, May 26, 2007, John Gardner, review of Tomorrow.
Observer (London, England), March 2, 2003, Adam Mars-Jones, review of The Light of Day, p. 17; April 8, 2007, Adam Mars-Jones, review of Tomorrow; March 1, 2009, Edward Marriott, “‘How Did I End Up Becoming a Novelist?’: Known for His Discretion, Graham Swift Is at Last Confronting His Own Past, Writes Edward Marriott”; August 3, 2015, Lucy Scholes, review of England and Other Stories.
People, May 21, 1984, review of Waterland, p. 26; May 20, 1985, Campbell Geeslin, review of Learning to Swim and Other Stories, p. 16.
Publishers Weekly, February 22, 1993, review of Ever After, p. 91; March 4, 1996, review of Last Orders, p. 53; March 31, 2003, review of The Light of Day, p. 39; July 23, 2007, review of Tomorrow, p. 42; February 17, 2020, review of Here We Are, p. 172.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 1, 2003, G.E. Murray, review of The Light of Day, p. F12.
San Francisco Chronicle, May 18, 2003, David Kipen, review of The Light of Day, p. M1; September 23, 2007, Martin Rubin, review of Tomorrow.
Spectator, April 26, 1980, Frank Rudman, review of The Sweet-Shop Owner, p. 22; October 8, 1983, review of Waterland, p. 26; March 12, 1988, J.L. Carr, review of Out of This World, p. 28; November 28, 1992, Anita Brookner, review of Ever After, p. 40; January 27, 1996, Caroline Moore, review of Last Orders, pp. 33-34; March 8, 2003, review of The Light of Day, p. 36; April 14, 2007, review of Tomorrow; May 23, 2009, Jeremy Treglown, review of Making an Elephant, p. 38; June 18, 2011, Anthony Cummins, review of Wish You Were Here, p. 37; July 12, 2014, Matthew Dennison, review of England and Other Stories, p. 41; February 20, 2016, Ellah Allfrey, review of Mothering Sunday, p. 34; May 17, 2025, Leyla Sanai, review of Twelve Post-War Tales, p. 35.
Sunday Times (London, England), March 1, 2009, Peter Parker, review of Making an Elephant.
Swiss News, May 1, 2007, review of Tomorrow, p. 59.
Telegraph (London, England), March 7, 2009, “Interview with Graham Swift”; July 14, 2015, Anthony Cummins, review of England and Other Stories.
Time, April 13, 1992, Pico Iyer, review of Ever After, p. 78.
Times Literary Supplement, March 11, 1988, Anne Duchene, review of Out of This World, p. 275; February 21, 1992, Lorna Sage, review of Ever After, p. 6; April 16, 1993, Alan Hollinghurst, review of Learning to Swim and Other Stories, p. 22; January 19, 1996, Oliver Reynolds, review of Last Orders, p. 25.
Vanity Fair, May, 2003, review of The Light of Day, p. 98.
Village Voice, July 2, 1985, review of Learning to Swim and Other Stories, p. 56; September, 1993, review of Waterland, p. 29.
Washington Post Book World, April 14, 1985, Jonathan Penner, review of Learning to Swim and Other Stories, p. 8; June 9, 1985, reviews of The Sweet-Shop Owner and Shuttlecock, p. 12; March 22, 1992, Ursula K. LeGuin, review of Ever After, p. 6; April 17, 2012, Ron Charles, review of Wish You Were Here.
World and I, December, 2003, review of The Light of Day, p. 230.
World Literature Today, September-October, 2025, Donald P. Kaczvinsky, review of Twelve Post-War Tales, p. 57.
Writer, February 1, 1998, Lewis Burke Frumkes, interview with Swift, p. 19.
ONLINE
Booker Prizes website, https://thebookerprizes.com/ (November 10, 2025), author profile.
BookPage, http://www.bookpage.com/ (April 1, 1992), Adam Begley, interview with Swift.
Contemporary Writers, http://www.contemporarywriters.com/ (October 12, 2010), Cora Lindsay, “Graham Swift.”
Curled Up with a Good Book, http://www.curledup.com/ (February 28, 2008), review of Tomorrow.
Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/ (April 14, 2007), Sophie Harrison, “Voice from the Street”; (January 16, 2021), “Graham Swift on Last Orders, 25 Years On: ‘I wasn’t born a writer—I had to become one.'”
Identity Theory, http://www.identitytheory.com/ (July 2, 2003), Robert Birnbaum, interview with The Light of Day.
Mostly Fiction, http://www.mostlyfiction.com/ (October 14, 2007), Mary Whipple, review of Tomorrow.
Oxonian Review, http://www.oxonianreview.org/ (February 6, 2008), Alexandra Harris, review of Tomorrow.
PopMatters, http://www.popmatters.com/ (December 18, 2007), Matthew Fiander, review of Tomorrow.
Graham Swift on Last Orders, 25 years on: 'I wasn't born a writer - I had to become one'
This article is more than 4 years old
Twenty-five years after his Booker prize‑winning novel was published, Swift reflects on how his story of a dark day trip to Margate became a celebration of life
Graham Swift
Sat 16 Jan 2021 06.00 EST
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When I wrote Last Orders in the early 1990s I was in my early 40s. My father had just died. The novel was my response and is dedicated to him. It was my first real recognition that “in the midst of life we are in death”, something that the pandemic now teaches us daily.
I’ve always felt that my literary journey began even when I was small, that the seeds of my desire to be a writer were sown in childhood. If it was no more at the time than an infant’s naive wish, it stuck and became lifelong. There were no writers in my family and I didn’t grow up in an environment that would have led me towards writing or anything artistic. My father was a minor civil servant in a dull office in London. In those days he might have called himself a “pen pusher”. In the war he’d been a fighter pilot. When my own puzzling urge to be a pen pusher of a different kind emerged he did not stand in its way. It was all my idea.
But I did grow up in the 1950s, before TV was prevalent and when the main forms of domestic entertainment were radio and reading, both word-based. I must have read my first storybooks – I mean the first ones I would have read solely for pleasure, not just for learning how to read – and, like many kids, been enchanted by them, but, unlike most kids, I must have said to myself: wouldn’t it be great to be one of these people who can produce this stuff to be found in the pages of books? Not much thought would have gone into this and of course it had nothing to do with any known ability, so it was no different from wanting to be an engine driver.
‘It seems I’m attracted to the seaside’ … Graham Swift, and as a child, right
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‘It seems I’m attracted to the seaside’ … Graham Swift, and as a child, right. Composite: Janus van den Eijnden , Simon and Schuster
But it stuck. It could be said I formed the dream of becoming a writer and the rest of my life was about making that dream come true. I wasn’t born a writer – is anyone? – I had to become one. I’ve never regretted either the dream or the long and sometimes tough process of turning myself into a writer. They’ve given my life meaning and fulfilment.
And they’ve given my life – I know this from many readers’ letters – something that can be shared meaningfully with the lives of others. I think fiction is fundamentally an act of sharing, of intimate human communion. There’s no limit to its intimacy, nor its candour. To be drawn into a story is like receiving an embrace, to know you are not alone. Readers may begin a novel feeling at first that they’re entering a foreign country. Who are these people? What has all this got to do with me? But then, if the story works, there will be a point when they say to themselves: “Hold on a moment, I’ve been there too.”
Last Orders is set, like many of my novels, in a small corner of England. It involves a journey from London to Margate on the north Kent coast – barely 50 miles. Most people outside England won’t have heard of Margate. But my novel can’t just be about a small corner of England or about Margate, because in the 25 years since it was published it has been translated into many languages and people from all over the world have written to me after reading it to say, in their own way, “I’ve been there too.”
It seems I’m attracted to the seaside. It features in several of my books. A large part of my latest novel, Here We Are, is set not just in Brighton, but in a theatre on Brighton Pier. But then we are all, surely, drawn to the seaside. It’s a deeply compelling – and paradoxical – place. We go there for enjoyment, yet at the same time it is an elemental zone where land and water meet and thus, with or without the presence of cliffs, it is implicitly precarious. Nothing could more embody this than the seaside pier – a flimsy-looking structure dedicated to fun and frivolity, deliberately constructed over the crashing waves.
In many ways it’s about life getting in the way of death, a frequent occurrence and one that can be highly comic
Last Orders isn’t just a day trip to the coast through the so-called “Garden of England”, but a primal journey, internal as well as external, through our common territory of mortality, its specific but timeless purpose that of the living to deal with the dead. But it would be wrong to say it’s a novel “about” death or that it’s particularly grim. In many ways it’s about life getting in the way of death, a frequent occurrence in the narrative and one that can be highly comic. I’d even go so far as to say that Last Orders is essentially a comic novel. It taught me a lot about how the deeply serious can also be funny. Neither the tragic nor the comic view of life will ever be complete and correct, but perhaps the mixture of the two can be.
The language of the novel is the language – the street language – of London. Or it’s that language, now somewhat changed and faded, as it was in the early 90s – the street language I’d heard all my life. Last Orders doesn’t transcribe it directly, but it honours it and weaves it into its fabric. It uses it as an internal language, a language of thought as much as speech. It’s a language, I discovered, capable now and then of great eloquence and directness. And humour. It’s not the language of “education”. The characters in the novel aren’t educated in any formal sense, but they’re educated by life. The language of the book is the language of their education.
I’d add something rather personal about the characters – not just the men who gather in a Bermondsey pub to go on their journey, but also one or two other characters who don’t accompany them, including one central female one. Since I first “met” them they’ve never gone away from me. They’re just as present now as when I began the novel. This is true too of other characters in other novels. They don’t recede. My earliest books remain as close to me as my most recent ones. They have a way of existing outside the normal passage of time, and the characters even have a way, for me, of existing outside the books in which they appear. I wouldn’t be surprised if I were actually to meet them.
Last Orders, Graham swift
Similarly, I don’t think I’ve ever lost touch with the enchantment of reading those first stories, long before I’d written any myself or even knew how to. Looking back over 14 books, I’m not sure I can say what the “knowing how” consists of. The pattern of my beginnings as a writer has only repeated itself with each individual work I’ve begun. I start with a mere glimmer, a dream. It’s then my task to make this dream come true. Nine times out of 10 it fades, as dreams do, but just occasionally, and always to my amazement, it turns into the extraordinarily concrete, complex and permanent thing that is a written narrative.
I think my appreciation of fiction’s magic has only intensified through my career. It’s thus not wholly surprising that my latest novel, Here We Are, should have a magician among its characters and be, at least in part, about magic. “Fiction” is a curious, deceptive word. It means of course what is unreal, artificial, made up. Yet we all know that when we’re in the grip of a good story it becomes real for us, it comes alive. We may feel it has the ring of truth. We may even say to ourselves: “I’ve been there too.” Thus fiction has the uncanny power to transform itself into the very opposite of what it purports to be. And if that’s not magic, what is?
But more than this. If fiction can come alive in this way then it will always be on the side of life, it will always have vitality, even when dealing, as it often does, with the more painful aspects of human experience. At best it will be a celebration of life and at least, when times get hard, it will be a glow in the dark.
Graham Swift’s latest novel Here We Are is published by Scribner UK.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Graham Swift
FRSL
Swift in the early 1980s
Swift in the early 1980s
Born Graham Colin Swift
4 May 1949 (age 76)
London, United Kingdom
Occupation Novelist
Education Dulwich College; Queens' College, Cambridge; University of York
Notable works Shuttlecock (1981)
Waterland (1983)
Last Orders (1996)
Notable awards Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (1983)
Booker Prize (1996)
James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1996)
Graham Colin Swift FRSL (born 4 May 1949) is a British writer. Born in London, UK, he was educated at Dulwich College, Queens' College, Cambridge, and later the University of York.
Career
Some of Swift's books have been filmed, including Waterland (1992), Shuttlecock (1993), Last Orders (1996) and Mothering Sunday (2021). His novel Last Orders was joint-winner of the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and a controversial winner of the 1996 Booker Prize, owing to the many similarities in plot and structure to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.
The prize-winning Waterland (1983) is set in The Fens. A novel of landscape, history and family, it is often cited as one of the outstanding post-war British novels and has been a set text on the English literature syllabus in British schools.[1][2] Writer Patrick McGrath asked Swift about the "feeling for magic" in Waterland during an interview. Swift responded that "The phrase everybody comes up with is magic realism, which I think has now become a little tired. But on the other hand there’s no doubt that English writers of my generation have been very much influenced by writers from outside who in one way or another have got this magical, surreal quality, such as Borges, Márquez, Grass, and that that has been stimulating. I think in general it’s been a good thing. Because we are, as ever, terribly parochial, self-absorbed and isolated, culturally, in this country. It’s about time we began to absorb things from outside."[3]
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984.[4]
Swift was acquainted with Ted Hughes[5] and has himself published poetry, some of which is included in Making an Elephant: Writing from Within (2009).
List of works
Novels
The Sweet-Shop Owner (1980)
Shuttlecock (1981) – winner of the 1983 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize
Waterland (1983) – shortlisted for Booker Prize
Out of this World (1988)
Ever After (1992)
Last Orders (1996) – winner of the 1996 Booker Prize
The Light of Day (2003) – long-listed for the Man Booker Prize.
Tomorrow (2007)
Wish You Were Here (2011)
Mothering Sunday (2016) ISBN 978-1101947524[6]
Here We Are (2020)
Nonfiction
Making an Elephant: Writing from Within (2009)
Short story collections
Learning to Swim and Other Stories (1982)
England and Other Stories (2014)
Twelve Post-War Tales (2025)
Short stories
"Blushes". The New Yorker. 11 January 2021.
"Fireworks". The New Yorker. 17 January 2022.
"Hinges". The New Yorker.[7] 14 November 2022.
"Bruises". The New Yorker. 25 September 2023.
Adaptations
Waterland was adapted into a film of the same name in 1992.[8] The film was directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal and starred Ethan Hawke, Jeremy Irons, and Sinéad Cusack.[9]
Swift's novel Mothering Sunday was adapted into a film in 2021, starring Olivia Colman and Colin Firth and featuring Glenda Jackson.[10]
Swift, Graham MOTHERING SUNDAY Knopf (Adult Fiction) $22.95 4, 19 ISBN: 978-1-101-94752-4
In England of 1924, a maid who knows her affair with an estate owner's son must end moves through that last day with sly humor and sensual detail. Swift (England and Other Stories, 2015, etc.) subtitles this slim novel "A Romance" and begins it like a fairy tale, with the words "Once upon a time." It's the first of numerous ironies. Narrated in the third person from the point of view and stream of consciousness of housemaid Jane Fairchild, 22, the story moves through the closing hours of her affair with Paul Sheringham, 23, the only remaining child of parents who lost their two other boys during World War I. It's Mothering Sunday, when domestics traditionally visit their mothers. Not only is the help vacating the Sheringham premises, but Paul's parents are away on a lunch outing. Many languorous post-coital pages describe how Paul moves naked about his bedroom, how he and Jane share a cigarette in bed, and finally his getting up and dressed and on the road to meet with the woman he is to marry in two weeks. Then come many equally unhurried pages in which Jane wanders naked around the empty house. The one-day time frame is broken by flashbacks to her days as an orphan, her coming into service, and aspects of life above and below stairs. The narrator also steps in to share with the reader things Jane doesn't yet know: that she will die at 98 after a career as a famous novelist and that Paul, for reasons only a spoiler would reveal, will never marry. Jane is a marvelous creation who can seem wry, world-weary, innocent, or lusty, bringing to mind Molly Bloom. Swift has fun with language, with class conventions, and with narrative expectations in a novel where nothing is as simple or obvious as it seems at first.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Swift, Graham: MOTHERING SUNDAY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2016. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A443086709/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=72afd5e4. Accessed 21 Oct. 2025.
Mothering Sunday: A Romance
by Graham Swift
Simon & Schuster, 12.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 132, ISBN 9781471155239
The opening of Graham Swift's new novel clearly signals his intent. 'Once upon a time' tells us that this will be a book about adversity and triumph. We know, because this is how fairy tales work, that there is the possibility of a happily ever after. And there is the hint too, in these opening lines, that the telling of the story will be as important as the tale itself.
Once upon a time there was a servant girl, a foundling, who had no family to visit on Mothering Sunday. It is 30 March 1924, a holiday for domestic staff. The Nivens and Sheringhams--occupants of the neighbouring households of Beechwood and Upleigh--are taking lunch at a hotel while their staff travel to visit their families. But Jane Fairchild, maidservant to the Nivens, is left behind. As with the best of fairy tales, the absence of a mother allows our heroine a freedom from expectation or obligation that will, we suspect, be the making of her.
When we first meet Jane she is lying naked in bed contemplating the equally naked form of Paul Sheringham, heir to Upleigh. They have just had sex. In fact, they have been having sex--in the stables, in the greenhouse--for the past six years. Our 22-year-old heroine is coming into womanhood in a world overwhelmed by the loss of a generation of men in the trenches of the Great War. Each of the households has lost two sons. Later in life Jane will recall 'all that accumulated loss and grief':
How could anyone be unaware of it? Every
week she dusted two rooms where everything
was to remain 'just as it was'. You went
in, took a little breath perhaps, and got on
with it.
On this Sunday, Paul, the sole surviving Sheringham son, is late for lunch with his fiancée. Of course, the affair with Jane is a secret and this is, she expects, one of their last encounters.
As Graham Swift recounts the events of this single, life-changing day, the reader is in sure and steady hands. Over the years, Jane will brood on the details of her time with Paul; the story unfolds in ever widening circles, often drawing back again and again to examine the same small action or thought. All the while the reader is thrown tiny titbits of the future and past. Although we are never far from the central events of that particular day in March, we learn that this young woman will rise from the bed and go on to live a long, remarkable life. We glimpse her as an old woman, an internationally acclaimed writer who lives to the age of 98, transcending the bleak promise of her station, gender and family circumstance. There is a lulling quality to the movement between sections of the book--rhythms and repetitions, the ebb and flow of a tide, the wearing down of rock to form sand on a beach. Once upon a time, 'a story was beginning'.
This is the story of a woman's becoming, as she discovers her power and possibility. It is a lot to pack into such a slim and tidy volume. But for all the detailed examination of character and the bold sweep of time, there is not a word wasted. Jane Fairchild is a figure who, once imagined, could easily have filled a novel five times as long as this. It is our luck that she has been gifted to a writer able to resist that temptation. For example, when we come to the pivotal moment, the moment that will mark Jane forever, Swift delivers it in two short lines --a lesson in poetic brevity. With a clear focus on the possibilities of the short form, he achieves a delicate harmony between the cool detachment of the narrative voice and the intensity of emotion conveyed on every page. This is a rare read indeed.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Allfrey, Ellah. "One fine spring day." Spectator, vol. 330, no. 9782, 20 Feb. 2016, pp. 34+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A443646413/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cbeb2329. Accessed 21 Oct. 2025.
MOTHERING SUNDAYA RomanceBy Graham Swift177 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $22.95.
In this compact, carefully styled novella set in 1924, the Booker Prize winner Graham Swift pays homage to Great Books from the early 20th century. Like ''Ulysses'' and ''Mrs. Dalloway,'' ''Mothering Sunday'' takes place on a single day, and is told through close third person and free indirect discourse. Swift refers to modernist writers like Woolf and Conrad, whose novels often turn on juxtapositions between the public and private spheres.
The opening sentence evokes nostalgia for the world lost in the Great War: ''Once upon a time, before the boys were killed and when there were more horses than cars. .Çê.Çê.'' Swift creates a distinctly post-World War I social landscape: prosperous Berkshire families devastated by the loss of their sons, learning to manage with fewer servants, drive cars and do (a handful of) their own domestic tasks. It's told from the point of view of Jane Fairchild, a servant in the Niven household, who's given a day off while her employers go to a luncheon party. On this beautiful spring day, the Nivens will lunch with the Sheringham family, whose only surviving son, Paul, is soon to marry the rich Emma Hobday. Meanwhile, said son has arranged to meet Jane Fairchild in his bedroom for a last secret tryst before his nuptials. They've been lovers for years. Welcome shout-outs to ''Gosford Park'' and ''Downton Abbey'' are evident in the plotting here.
It's the first (and last) time Jane sees Paul's bedroom, which we know because the day is being remembered by Jane at the end of a long and successful life. She's lived into her 90s; she's a famous writer. It's a day of intense, surging emotion and tragic loss that suits the Woolfian: ''It was only as she turned through the gates that the extraordinariness, the unprecedented gift of it -- yes, it was her day -- came to her.''
Paul and Jane arrange their meeting by telephone that morning; Jane calls Paul ''madam'' so the Nivens, ''still occupied with toast and marmalade,'' won't know who's called. Jane's giddy with it: ''He'd opened the front door for her -- the front door, no less, as if she were a real visitor and he were a head footman -- they'd laughed at her calling him 'madam.' ''
Swift describes events long in the past in a way that gives them intense and permanent presentness. The vividly lost quality of the day is conveyed through a series of repeating motifs. The phone call, white orchids in the Sheringhams' hall, Paul's bedsheets. The story has an unmoored, dreamy quality, which captures the way such days become lodged in the recollections of youth.
The book's subtitle is ''A Romance.'' It refers to Paul and Jane's doomed affair, and it also seems to describe Swift's sense of the interwar years, a time of immense national loss that somehow felt precious because it brought people together in tragedy. There's romance, too, in Swift's account of Jane as a writer, since we flash forward to her success in late life, omitting the intervening years of obscurity, torturous drafts, uncertain cash flow and mixed reviews.
Historical novels are most compelling when they say something about the present as well as the past. Swift shows that the elegance and lyricism of high modernist writing still has value for contemporary fiction, but the book is inconclusive and vague. I wasn't sure why it was a novella, since Swift's style and themes are so weighty, but the lush, sorrowful prose gives considerable pleasure.
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DRAWING (DRAWING BY FRANZISKA BARCZYK)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The New York Times Company
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Gee, Sophie. "Upstairs, Downstairs." The New York Times Book Review, 17 Apr. 2016, p. 13(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A449724580/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=78ac9804. Accessed 21 Oct. 2025.
Swift, Graham HERE WE ARE Knopf (Adult Fiction) $22.95 4, 21 ISBN: 978-0-525-65805-4
A sleight-of-hand novel about a seaside British revue in the late 1950s, before everything changed.
Master novelist Swift (Last Orders, 1996, etc.) invites readers to see parallels between the tricks he is pulling and the magic act that is the ostensible subject of his novel. Or is it? As Swift writes of a magician and the assistant to whom he is betrothed, "The act had become a fluid phenomenon, yet full of a thrilling tension. You never knew what might happen next. This in itself became part of the attraction." And so it is with this slight but charming novel, which opens with two men and a woman, introducing a triangle. The woman is Evie ("first of women"), and the names of the two men keep shifting, as the novel suggests that identities tend to do. One is Jack, the emcee of the show, a song-and-dance man in charge of the pacing of the production. The other is magician Ronnie, who becomes "the Great Pablo" at Jack's behest. Though the novel seems to introduce Jack as the protagonist, it is Ronnie's backstory that dominates. Where Jack and Evie had both been pushed toward the stage by showbiz mothers, "Ronnie Deane was a different kettle of fish and as Evie, but only with some persistence, would find out, had had a different introduction to the world of entertainment, and a different kind of mother." Two of them, in fact, or maybe two different childhoods, as he had been sent to safety during the World War II bombings by an impoverished mother to a more privileged home in the countryside. There, Ronnie became a different boy, with a different destiny, one that would lead him first to Jack and then, at Jack's behest, to Evie. The bare bones of the plot don't have much more flesh on them, but the hocus pocus of identity and destiny, how we become who we are and make the choices we do, offers plenty of surprise as well as revelation.<
A novel that agrees with Shakespeare that all the world's a stage.
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"Swift, Graham: HERE WE ARE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2020. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A612619336/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1168d608. Accessed 21 Oct. 2025.
Graham Swift. Knopf, $22.95 (208p) ISBN 978-0-525-65805-4
Saturated with images and metaphors that recur like melodies, this jewel of a novel by Booker-winner Swift (Last Orders) conjures the shared past of a group of entertainers who performed together in 1959. In seaside Brighron, England, 28-year-old showman Jack Robinson hires his old army buddy, the magician Ronnie Deane, to be part of his variety show. The enigmatic magician in turn hires the lovely Evie to jazz up his act, and soon puts an engagement ring on her finger. Jack's show becomes a success, with Ronnie and Evie's set as "the Great Pablo and Eve" the major attraction, though from the beginning, Swift hints that there will be no happy ending for the "lopsided trio." In Swift's trademark fashion, his close-third narration intertwines each character's perspective to construct the tragic story in seamless transitions, gradually revealing past transgressions and sources of pain as time bends back on itself. A now elderly Evie mostly looks on from the present, while chapters on Ronnie deepen Swift's bittersweet tone by following Ronnie's journey as a boy sent during the London Blitz in WWII to live with a beloved surrogate mother and father, from whom he learns his craft. Swift's brief, magical tale demonstrates one more brilliant example of his talent for pulling universal themes out of the hats of ordinary lives. (Apr.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 PWxyz, LLC
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"Here We Are." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 7, 17 Feb. 2020, p. 172. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A615711358/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6fb0b4a1. Accessed 21 Oct. 2025.
Here We Are
Graham Swift
Scribner, 208pp,
14.99[pounds sterling]
Tyll
Daniel Kehlmann
translated by Ross Benjamin
Riverrun, 352pp, 18.99[pounds sterling]
The idea that literature is a cousin of sorcery or sleight of hand goes at least as far back as Ovid's poem sequence Metamorphoses, though its ubiquity in modern times can probably be credited to Shakespeare's (highly Ovidian) final play The Tempest, in which the concept of "rough magic" is used to encompass both spells and stagecraft. According to this strain of thought, language is in the business of creation and mutation, and the writer is a sort of master-mage, a conjuror of new life who reads minds and travels through time while performing lightning-quick transformations with the help of metaphor.
The latest novels by Graham Swift and Daniel Kehlmann, both virtuoso writers in their very different ways, take this conceit about as far as it will go--or further. Here We Are concerns a trio of illusionists in Brighton in 1959, the last summer of good old-fashioned entertainment, in Swift's view. Kehlmann's Tyll, which has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, follows a notorious, possibly demonic trickster around Bavaria and Westphalia during the Thirty Years War (1618-48).
Both novels perform ostentatious tricks with time-scheme. Swift makes repeated leaps to 2009, when Eve White, a former magician's assistant, is resisting overtures from would-be biographers of her late husband, the performer Jack Robinson. Kehlmann uses his omnipotence to move Tyll half-a-millennium forward and jumps back and forth to tell the story, presenting his central character at the height of his fame (recalled by an audience member who has since been killed), as a fledgling tightrope-walker, and as the employee of Frederick V, the beleaguered "Winter King". At one point Kehlmann winds forward to the early 18th century--as in Here We Are, the main events of the novel have become the stuff of legend--when a fat old Viennese count is writing his memoirs and striving to recall when the Kaiser commissioned him to track down the most famous jester in the Holy Roman empire, said to be stranded in a ruined abbey.
Neither book is exactly reticent about employing literary devices reminiscent of its subject matter, but Swift appears to view this as his only task. At times his novel feels like an exercise in the generation of approximately relevant tropes. Barely 50 pages from the end, he is still keen to make his point: "It was not just that a vase of flowers had appeared from nowhere. He himself had become a different person."
On the whole Swift seems rather too amazed by the existence of figurative language. When the third member of the trio, Ronnie, who starts off as Jack's sidekick and Eve's boyfriend, takes a train from Oxfordshire back to Brighton, Swift writes: "Surrey became Sussex." Approached by fans in the street, Jack "becomes" his most famous character, Terry Treadwell. The implication is that the reader, before turning to this novel, imagined that language was straightforward and reality simple. But it's Swift who ends up seeming naive. In one scene, he attempts to ring mystery from the extraordinary changes that Ronnie observes during a postwar visit to London, implying the buildings had been magically turned into rubble, when it's clearly the work of the Luftwaffe.
Swift's writing has become more overtly omnipotent in recent years, with the shift in Wish You Were Here (2011) and Mothering Sunday (2016)--to a roving third-person narrator following decades of monologues. But even when his work was overseen by a single backward-looking character, he always exploited the potential for dramatic irony. Mothering Sunday was his first novel that didn't hinge on some dreadful secret mentioned in the early pages then strenuously concealed. Here We Are shows Swift returning to his old ways, with the added irritation that the postponement applies also to the mystery--the thing we're supposed to be curious about--and not only its solution. In previous novels, we have been waiting to know why a character is holding a gun, or what they are going to tell their children the following day. In this case, we are only told that there was an incident involving Ronnie and "the police". It hardly whets the appetite.
To keep things moving, Swift indulges in a fair bit of verbal analysis--for example, of the way "business" and "beat" are able to denote more than one activity or phenomenon. "Windfall" is described as a "hocus-pocus sort of word that might mean anything". But most words--windfall is surely among them--mean particular things, and the reader cannot simply accept, at least not without some form of clarification, the claim that Ronnie's mother was at the same time "hardened" and "softened" by the Second World War.
In novels such as Last Orders--which won the Booker Prize in 1996--and The Light of Day (2003), Swift was keen to ask what a cliche might still have to tell us, or what fun there is to have with it. The new novel, by contrast, harasses the reader with sentences such as, "The show must go on, but sometimes things happen and it can't," and the would-be philosophical conundrum, "The show must go on. But must it? Who says?" This makes for a somewhat jerky reading experience. You cannot encounter a phrase such as, "She'd try anything once" or, "Show him what was what" without pausing to consider what Swift is up to, though all too frequently the conclusion is that no marvellous act of mutation has transpired, the cliche remains a cliche.
Daniel Kehlmann--one of the most feted German novelists at work today--splashes about in similar waters, but his ideas are grander and his effects more elaborate. Kehlmann's anti-hero and part-time protagonist, Tyll, is a commanding figure, like Prospero without Miranda or redemption. But the novel's composite narrative structure seems more sinister and elusive when Tyll is presented via other viewpoints, as a visitor or interloper, than when we are given, say, a dutiful account of his jester apprenticeship. (He practises a great deal.) The focus on the historical cast allows some broad clues to Kehlmann's invention--for example, a flashback to the original production of The Tempest, attended by the Winter King's wife, Elizabeth Stuart. (She enjoys some post-show chatter with the playwright.)
Kehlmann's emphasis on forms of language goes beyond idle wordplay and informs the novel's engagement with language as a tool of power. "Your Highness" indicates one thing and "Your Majesty" another. When Tyll is asked what the Kaiser is like, he replies: he sleeps, and he likes it when people are nice to him. But in an atmosphere of superstition, names and titles retain a symbolic power that is easily mistaken for real. The Winter King debates with Elizabeth whether he could possibly play the Caesar role in the unfolding conflict when the title of his opponent the Kaiser--is literally derived from Caesar.
At one point, literary interpretation is exposed for its tendency to transfigure the truth, when Donne's "No man is an island" is invoked as a poem intended to urge James I to support Frederick V. But Kehlmann is not averse to reminding us of more banal ways in which language is a form of prestidigitation, a slippery act. At one point on his quest to locate Tyll, the Austrian count meets a former soldier from the Kaiser's army who tells him he was "almost in Vienna once". He asks what happened, and the soldier replies that "nothing happened, I didn't make it". Just as Ronnie in Here We Are observes that a green baize card table is also "not a table", Tyll tells an audience member, "My sister over there is Nele. She's not my sister." And Kehlmann is guilty of the occasional groan-provoking in-joke: "A king without a country in a storm, alone with his fool--something like this would never happen in a play, it was too absurd."
If there's a larger problem, it's that Kehlmann's nimble way with concepts never pervades the novel's tone or texture. The set-pieces are solidly done. (There's a lot of fear and awe from onlookers.) This may be a product of the self-consciousness that he brings to a subject surely better-suited to the impish and on-the-hoof. On finishing both these books, one is left with the sense that being mechanically playful is as flat a contradiction as you would expect, and that literature may be on easier terms with its own magical essence when authors are not nudging us persistently to notice it.
Caption: Jestering: Daniel Kehlmann's "part-time protagonist" is Tyll, a hero of German folk tales
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 New Statesman, Ltd.
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Robson, Leo. "Illusions of grandeur: Writers in awe of their own conjuring tricks." New Statesman, vol. 149, no. 5534, 21 Aug. 2020, pp. 50+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A634541080/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d4b58b6f. Accessed 21 Oct. 2025.
HERE WE AREBy Graham Swift
It is August 1959 and we are at the end of the pier in Brighton, England, watching the kind of seaside variety show that is already slipping into history. The stars of the show are Jack, the M.C., and a handsome young magician called Pablo who, together with his shimmering assistant, Eve, has taken the summer season by storm. Further down the bill is the usual job lot of jugglers and plate spinners (and a talking teddy bear). While Jack goes through his jaunty schtick -- ''you're in Brighton, folks, so bloody well brighten up!'' -- he simultaneously fights the panicky realization that this whole performance is taking place ''on a flimsy structure built over swirling water.''
This is classic Graham Swift territory, a place where the present always feels caught between a richer past and a featureless future. Swift's central characters are constantly assailed by the suspicion that they have been set down in the wrong time, obliged to live out a life that might have been theirs if they were two decades older. Jack, in particular, has spotted that the world of working-class conviviality at which he excels as a 28-year-old will be swept away by television, not to mention the Beatles. ''The future's elsewhere, don't you think?'' he urgently asks Eve, who at this point is simply relieved that she and Pablo are such a hit with this week's audience.
Just how right Jack's prediction turns out to be is one of the main threads of this very short novel. In flashbacks narrated by an elderly Eve in 2009, we learn how Jack managed to ride those changes in taste and technology to become a much-loved television star and producer -- not bad for ''an old song-and-dance man.'' Eve knows this story well because she has been married to Jack for nearly 50 years; she's his ''managing director'' and the minder of ''the all-important little key in the small of his back'' that she winds up to get him going.
But it is neither charismatic Jack nor steely Eve whose back story sits at the heart of this novel. That space belongs to the third member of the Brighton trio, the suave magician Pablo, who is actually Ronnie Deane from the East End of London. Swift is in his element describing Ronnie's social transformation, which begins when he is evacuated as a child during the war to genteel Oxford, where he lodges with a childless couple, the Lawrences. From Eric Lawrence, who dabbles in stage magic, Ronnie picks up the spectacular sleights of hand that will enable him to make white rabbits appear from nowhere and build an act that involves running Eve through with a sword twice nightly.
''Here we are!'' is the anxiously bright phrase adopted by Ronnie's foster mother, a relieved response to the fact that everyone she is fond of, including her cockney foster son, is gathered safely under her roof. It also acts as an unwitting reproach to young Ronnie, who feels guiltily relieved that his real mother, a house cleaner, is not here to disturb his newly sophisticated life, but remains instead at a safe distance in bomb-spattered London.
Just at the point when some of this might begin to feel too familiar -- there are structural and tonal elements that sharply recall ''Mothering Sunday,'' Swift's most recent and much-praised novel -- we are propelled into something extraordinary. Back now in Brighton in 1959, Eve tells Ronnie that she can't marry him, but wants to be with Jack instead. In response Ronnie pulls off one last, and quite staggering, illusion. Swift's closing account of a mundane world momentarily pierced by a shaft of numinous mystery is magnificent. It is what he did so brilliantly in ''Waterland'' (1983), his breakthrough magic realist novel, and what he has rigorously steered clear from since. How delightful it is, then, to see a glimpse of that other Graham Swift -- flamboyant, luxurious, outrageous even -- back before our very eyes.
Kathryn Hughes's most recent book is ''Victorians Undone.'' HERE WE ARE By Graham Swift 195 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $22.95.
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PHOTO: (PHOTOGRAPH BY Sophie Lecuyer FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 The New York Times Company
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Hughes, Kathryn. "Fading Glory." The New York Times Book Review, 25 Oct. 2020, p. 18(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A639356154/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=afbabae4. Accessed 21 Oct. 2025.
Twelve Post-War Tales. By Graham Swift. May 2025. 176p. Knopf, $27 (9780593803387); e-book (9780593803394).
Death defies words but permits moments of clarity in this collection of loss-saturated short stories from Booker laureate Swift (Here We Are, 2020). Many connect personal circumstances and historical events. In one story, a German soldier turned bureaucrat grapples with guilt and complicity when asked to help find a Jewish private's lost relatives. In another, a couple considers calling off their wedding during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Other tales are propelled by more contemporary losses; an English Filipino maid contemplates her longtime service at the American Embassy on 9/11: a widowed doctor volunteers his life on the COVID-19 ward. But the book's most affecting moments confront the universal truths of aging and mortality and their proximity to life-creating impulses. A grieving widower visits the empty dorm room of his dead granddaughter and is inexplicably attracted to his university-administrator host. A woman cannot find the words to speak at her father's funeral, but a glimpse of the wooden coffin brings her back to her earliest sexual stirrings. In stark, immediate prose, deployed with utmost patience, Swift holds us close and points to powerful truths.--Brendan Driscoll
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 American Library Association
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Driscoll, Brendan. "Twelve Post-War Tales." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 15-16, Apr. 2025, p. 47. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A847030197/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5be515dc. Accessed 21 Oct. 2025.
Swift, Graham TWELVE POST-WAR TALES Knopf (Fiction None) $27.00 5, 6 ISBN: 9780593803387
In his latest collection, Swift probes the complicated lives of Britons young and old living in the long shadow of World War II.
In "Fireworks," the Cuban Missile Crisis threatens to cancel the wedding of 19-year-old Sophie. People might not show up "if there's still a situation," says the father of the groom. To which Sophie's father answers, "No one's calling off my daughter's wedding just because the world's going to end." In "Black," set in England's East Midlands in 1944, 18-year-old Nora boldly sits next to a handsome Black American airman on a bus and is quickly drawn to him. The friendly encounter, shocking to all aboard, is life-altering in multiple ways for the daughter of a chronic wife-abuser: "This was what she hadn't foreseen. That a man can just hit you. Not in that way. Just hit you." In "The Next Best Thing," young British private Joseph Caan travels to Germany in 1959 to track the fate of his relatives. He has a creepy encounter with an overly polite functionary who, told that Caan's Jewish, German-born father was killed in Tobruk as a British soldier, insinuatingly says he was there too--"on the other side, of course." In "Passport," an 82-year-old woman living alone in a state of confusion is transported back to when she was 3 and her mother was killed during the London Blitz--a day that left a deep imprint on her but of which she has no memory. "How can we remember that we didn't have a memory?" she muses. In Swift's touching, deeply humane stories, life leaves its mark in mysterious and sometimes-humorous ways. His gift for capturing in revealing detail the interior lives of people coping--or failing to cope--with disappointment gives each of these stories a rare depth.
A brilliant, illuminating collection of short fiction, perhaps the author's best.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Swift, Graham: TWELVE POST-WAR TALES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A837325657/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=30f407dc. Accessed 21 Oct. 2025.
Twelve Post-War Tales
by Graham Swift
Scribner, UK [pounds sterling]18.99, pp. 304
When Granta magazine's list of Best of Young British Novelists first appeared in 1983 it was a cue for me to immerse myself in the work of the named writers. There was the dazzling sardonic humour and knowing intelligence of Martin Amis; Ian McEwan's twisty psychological thrillers; the cool prose of Kazuo Ishiguro, masking latent pain; and the fantastical, rich threads of Salman Rushdie. Rose Tremain's anthropological insights and Pat Barker's harrowing war stories were also transfixing.
It took me a while to get to Graham Swift, but when I read Waterland, Mothering Sunday and the Booker-winning Last Orders, I was quietly absorbed. Swift didn't aim for the pyrotechnics of his literary brothers. If they were strutting peacocks in the aviary of new writers, he was a sparrow. His writing was smaller, less gaudy, yet capable of inducing deep emotion and indelibly etched memories.
So it is with his short stories. His style is the opposite of McEwan's, who, when I asked him about implausibility in the otherwise wonderful On Chesil Beach, told me he wrote about the one in a million chance of something extraordinary happening to people. Swift writes about the ordinary. This is not to say that the events that befall his protagonists are trite. They are not. But they are the stuff of quotidian life--bereavement, ageing and PTSD in a former soldier. Wars are sometimes momentous--the second world war--but others are private battles, such as the trauma of losing a parent, spouse or grandchild.
Swift focuses his lens so that in each vignette we have a close-up of everything in that microcosm, including inside the protagonist's head. Post-war, an officer who fought for the Nazis meets a young Jewish soldier seeking help in tracking down relatives who may have survived the Holocaust. A frail elderly woman longs to lose her mind so as to reduce her awareness of her infirmity.
There are no twists, and a protagonist sometimes analyses semantics in a way that only language aficionados do. I prefer Swift's novels, where we have a longer journey with the intricately drawn characters. But these stories are very powerful and poignant snapshots.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
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Sanai, Leyla. "Battling on." Spectator, vol. 358, no. 10264, 17 May 2025, pp. 35+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A840390019/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b0fd49bb. Accessed 21 Oct. 2025.
GRAHAM SWIFT
Twelve Post-War Tales
New York. Knopf. 2025.304 pages.
BEST KNOWN as the author of Waterland (1983) and Last Orders (1996), for which he won the Booker Prize, Graham Swift, now in his later career, has concentrated primarily on works shorter in length, like the collection England and Other Stories (2014) and the novellas Mothering Sunday (2016) and Here We Are (2020). Twelve Post-War Tales follows in this vein, recording the lives of those transformed by the violence of World War II and its aftermath. The major characters in these stories are often advanced in age, and most, not surprisingly, are reflective about the many losses and few gains in their lives after the war. Old age brings no "abundant recompense" in wisdom, but then again there are few "aching joys" of childhood either. Instead, there is the war--and lots of orphans.
The collection underscores one of Swift's major themes: the uncertain benefits or even possibility of gaining knowledge of the past. In the opening story, "The Next Best Thing," Herr Büchner, who works in a German civic government office in 1959, is visited by Private Joseph Caan with the British Army of the Rhine. Private Caan is inquiring about the fate of his Jewish relatives in Hanover. But Herr Büchner can only help him so much. The Rathaus does not handle such cases. That is for the Tracing Service. After Caan leaves, Herr Büchner thinks, '"What did they expect, after all, what did they really hope for ... To be given back the actual ashes, the actual dust, the actual bones?"
The title of the book hints at the complexity of Swift's narrative technique. Calling these postwar stories "Tales" implies light fiction or adventure stories, something Kipling may have written. In fact, all the stories but one have a one-word title--"Blushes," "Beauty," "Zoo," "Hinges," "Kids"--which suggest children's stories to be read at bedtime. Indeed, a few of the stories rarely rise above entertainments, like "Chocolate," a story told by pub mates about a girl who "worked in chocolate."
Yet in the best of these pieces, the "tales" demonstrate Swift's masterful ability to link the local and the global, the historical and the personal, while connecting two events separated by both years and place. Dr. Cole, in "Blushes," for instance, is seventy-two, a retired respiratory surgeon and widower, now on-call during the Covid pandemic. On his drive to the hospital early one April morning, he remembers a visit when he was ten by Dr. Henderson, who diagnosed his scarlet fever. More importantly, he recalls the intimacy between Dr. Henderson and his own mother during the visit. Now much older and a bit wiser, he grasps what puzzled him as a child: why Dr. Henderson would have been invited to his tenth birthday party, and why his mother encouraged him to become a doctor in the first place.
Since Swift is often criticized for writing only about middle-to upper-class white men, his most significant development in this collection is the diversity of his characters and voices. "Zoo," for example, is narrated by a "Filipina maid" born in England. In "Black," the best story of the collection, Swift provides a glimpse of the social and cultural tension that characterizes the postwar period. It's 1984, at the height of the violence of the miners' strike. Nora Armstrong recalls how forty years ago, when she was eighteen, she had "done something extraordinary and daring" but "fine": she had sat next to a Black American airman on a bus, to the shock of her neighbors and friends. She knew the act would get back to her Nottingham miner father, who would be furious. He would "kill her." But instead, the act gives her the courage to outface her father and his domestic violence.
In "Passport," the final story of the collection, Anna-Maria Alice Anderson, an orphan, former teacher, and divorcée, celebrates her eighty-second birthday on October 10, 2019, by taking out her passport in order to recall when exactly she was born. Instead, she remembers how, on her second birthday, she secretly saw her mother lovingly kiss the nape of her father's neck and whisper his name. She thinks, as she looks at the photo on the passport, "Not another year, please ... the world, it seemed, had nothing specially lined up for her, either to whisk her away or to detain her." Although her own postwar life has been a series of disappointments, the knowledge that her parents were madly in love seems enough for a lifetime.
Donald P. Kaczvinsky
Louisiana Tech University
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
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Kaczvinsky, Donald P. "GRAHAM SWIFT: Twelve Post-War Tales." World Literature Today, vol. 99, no. 5, Sept.-Oct. 2025, pp. 57+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A853484142/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=906df1b5. Accessed 21 Oct. 2025.