Graham Swift

"From the Booker Award winner: a luminous, profoundly moving work of fiction that begins with an afternoon tryst in 1924 between a servant girl and the young man of the neighboring house, but then opens to reveal the whole life of a remarkable woman. Twenty-two-year-old Jane Fairchild, orphaned at birth, has worked as a maid at one English country estate since she was sixteen. And for almost all of those years she has been the secret lover to Paul Sheringham, the scion of the estate next door. On an unseasonably warm March afternoon, Jane and Paul will make love for the last time--though not, as Jane believes, because Paul is about to be married--and the events of the day will alter Jane's life forever. As the narrative moves back and forth from 1924 to the end of the century, what we know and understand about Jane--about the way she loves, thinks, feels, sees, remembers--deepens with every beautifully wrought moment. Her story is one of profound self-discovery and through her, Graham Swift has created an emotionally soaring and deeply affecting work of fiction"--

A Romance

Mothering Sunday

In his newest novel, acclaimed author Graham Swift marries the erratic devastations of reality with the elusive probability of magic under the lights of vaudeville, a story of delicate illusions where what one chooses to believe can unearth the most revealing connections. It's the summer of 1959, and something magical can be witnessed at the end of the pier in beach town Brighton, England. Jack Robbins, Ronnie Deane, and Evie White are performing in a seaside variety show, starring as Jack Robinson the compere comedian, and The Great Pablo and Eve: a magic act. By the end of the summer, Evie's glinting engagement ring will be flung to the bottom of the ocean and one of the trifecta will vanish forever. All three friends begin their path toward the end of Brighton's pier early in life. Evie and Jack's mothers always trumpeting the support that is trademark of stage mothers, while Ronnie's mother sends her son out in the child evacuations to Penny and Eric Lawrence for safety from the London blitz. It's within the safety and love of Evergrene, the Lawrences' estate, that magic creeps into Ronnie's life for the first time and starts the intricate intertwining of fate, chance, and show business. Magic and reality share the stage in this masterly and devastating story that pulls back the curtain on the power of love, family, and the touchstones of our memories.

Here We Are

In this novel from the author of Sweet Shop Owner, 3 close friends of the late Jack Dodds travel togethe r to pay him their last respects and carry out his final wis h: that his ashes be buried at sea. On the voyage, they tell their own life stories. '

Last Orders

Shortlisted for the 1983 Booker prize, winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize. Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the story-telling animal. Tom Crick is a passionate teacher, but before he is forced into retirement by scandal, he has one last history lesson to deliver: his own. Spanning more than 200 years in the lives of its haunted narrator and his ancestors, Waterland is a visionary tale of England's mysterious Fen country. Taking in eels and incest, ale-making and madness, the discovery of a body and a tragic family romance, this is an extraordinary novel about the heartless sweep of history and man's changing place within it. In the years since its first publication in 1983, Graham Swift's Waterland has established itself as a much-loved classic of twentieth-century British literature. It was shortlisted for the Booker prize, won the Guardian Fiction Prize and has been adapted into a film starring Jeremy Irons and Ethan Hawke. Superbly done: WATERLAND appropriates the Fens as Moby Dick did whaling or Wuthering Heights the moors. This is a beautiful, serious and intelligent novel, admirably ambitious and original. Observer Perfectly controlled, superbly written, and, as they used to say, riveting. WATERLAND is original, compelling and narration of the highest order. Guardian WATERLAND is a quite brilliant novel, so good that whether Graham Swift wins the booker Prize or not is in a sense a matter of little consequence. Daily Telegraph Positively Faulknerian in its concentration on murder, incest, guilt and insanity. The brooding sense of place as a shaping force in the novel's action is as powerful as Hardy's Wessex or Dickens's London. Time Out WATERLAND has the air of a novel classically at ease in its chosen, and uniquely particular, field of reference...Swift takes on and refracts a varied tradition: the family saga, the business saga, the novel of provincial life...and lays an unpredictable claim on a resonant area of life which he has made unequivocally his own. Times Literary Supplement A 300-page tour de force...A burst of exuberant fictive energy. Evening Standard A gothic family saga, a detective story and a philosophical meditation on the nature and uses of history...Rich, ingenious, inspired. New York Times WATERLAND is a formidably intelligent book animated by an impressive, angry pity at what human creatures are capable of doing to one another in the name of love and need...the most powerful novel I have read for some time. New York Review of Books Graham Swift's novel teems with energy, fertility, violence, madness...stunning. Washington Post Astonishing...an overwhelming success...the writing is fluid and earthy, eerie and realistic, complex and simple all at once. San Francisco Chronicle Mr Swift's first novel to be published in America introduces us to an artist doing almost everything right... A taut, exciting tale given resonance by the author's provocative and pungent meditations. Wall Street Journal A masterpiece...intellectually bold, provocative and challenging. The Nation Powerful, unforgettable...a stunning, wholly original work. Newsday A virtuoso performance. USA Today

Waterland

The Booker Prize-winning author of Last Orders traces a day in the life of divorced private investigator George Webb as he evaluates his past as a police officer, unpromising prospects, and all-consuming relationship with a former client. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

The Light of Day

These twenty-five new stories mark Graham Swift's return to the short form after seven acclaimed novels and confirm him as a master storyteller. They unite into a richly peopled vision of a country that is both a crucible of history and a maze of contemporary confusions. Meet Dr Shah who has never been to India and Mrs Kaminski, on her way to Poland via A&E; meet Holly and Polly who have come to their own Anglo-Irish understanding and Lily Hobbs, married to a shirt; Charlie and Don who have seen the docks turn into Docklands; Mr Wilkinson the weirdo next door; Daisy Baker who is terrified of Yorkshire; and Johnny Dewhurst, stranded on Exmoor. Graham Swift steers us effortlessly from the Civil War to the present day, from world-shaking events to the secret dramas lived out in rooms, workplaces, homes. With his remarkable sense of place, he charts an intimate human geography. In doing so he moves us profoundly, but with a constant eye for comedy. Binding these stories together is Swift's grasp of the universal in the local and his affectionate but unflinching instinct for the story of us all: an evocation of that mysterious body that is a nation, deepened by the palpable sense of our individual bodies finding or losing their way in the nationless territory of birth, growing up, sex, ageing and death.

England and Other Stories

Angleterre, 30 mars 1924. C'est le dimanche des mères, jour où les aristocrates donnent congé à leurs domestiques pour qu'ils rendent visite à leur famille. Jane, une jeune femme de chambre orpheline, le passera en compagnie de Paul, son amant de longue date. traversant la campagne inondée de soleil, elle le rejoint pour un dernier rendez-vous car Paul s'apprête à épouser une riche héritière. Mais les choses ne se déroulent pas comme prévu. Ce dimanche changera à jamais le destin de Jane. Graham Swift dépeint avec subtilité une aristocratie déclinante, porteuse des stigmates de la guerre, et l'émergence d'une classe nouvelle en quête de liberté. Un roman d'une intensité rare, troublant de grâce, de mystère et de sensualité.

Le dimanche des mères

After a brush with death, Bill Unwin discovers notebooks from a Victorian ancestor that help him piece together his own life with their meditations on the human condition

Ever After

Set in the bleak Fen Country of East Anglia, and spanning some 240 years in the lives of its haunted narrator and his ancestors, Waterland is a book that takes in eels and incest, ale-making and madness, the heartless sweep of history and a family romance as tormented as any in Greek tragedy. "Waterland, like the Hardy novels, carries with all else a profound knowledge of a people, a place, and their interweaving.... Swift tells his tale with wonderful contemporary verve and verbal felicity.... A fine and original work."--Los Angeles Times

This novel follows four men once close to Jack Dodds, a London butcher, who meet to carry out his last wish: to have his ashes scattered into the sea.

This novel of love in the world of 1950s vaudeville is a masterwork of literary magic from the Booker Prize-winning author of Last Orders and Mothering Sunday It is 1959, in Brighton, England, and the theater at the end of the famous pier is having its best summer season in years. Ronnie, a brilliant young magician, and Evie, his dazzling assistant, are top of the bill, drawing full houses every night. And Jack is everyone's favorite master of ceremonies, holding the whole show together. But as the summer progresses, the offstage drama among the three begins to overshadow their success onstage. Intimately alive, tenderly comic, and quietly shattering, Here We Are is a masterly work of literary magicianship from a true master.

Su diyarı

Set in Southeast England, friendship and love among a group of men whose lives have been intertwined since World War II. When one dies, the survivors are brought together and are forced to take stock of the paths their lives have taken, by choice and by accident, since the war. Winner of the 1996 Booker Prize.

Prentis, senior clerk in the ‘dead crimes’ department of police archives, is becoming more and more confused. Alienated from his wife and children, and obsessed by his father, a wartime hero now the mute inmate of a mental hospital, Prentis feels increasingly unsettled as his enigmatic boss, Mr Quinn, turns his investigation towards him - and his father. Gradually Prentis suspects that his father’s breakdown and Quinn’s menacing behaviour are connected and the link is to be found in his father’s memoirs, ‘Shuttlecock’ . . . ‘Excellent, profound’ Alan Hollinghurst, London Review of Books ‘An astonishing study of forms of guilt, laced with a thread of detection, and puckering now and then into outrageous humour’ Sunday Times ‘A superbly written claustrophobic account of power that corrupts private and public life and of guilt that becomes obsession’ Daily Telegraph ‘Swift’s central strength as a writer is his integrity. Story and character are treated with a seriousness and respect that while allowing for the oddity of human behaviour – Shuttlecock is thoroughly and beautifully odd – always honours them’ Times Literary Supplement ‘Serious, moving and often very funny indeed’ Observer

Shuttlecock

In his first nonfiction work, the Booker Prize-winning author presents a varied selection of essays, poetry, and interviews that all offer insights on what it means to be a writer.

Writing from Within

Making an Elephant

Un giorno di festa

30 mars 1924. Det är ”mödrarnas söndag”, dagen på året då tjänstefolket får ledigt för att åka hem. En som inte åker hem är den föräldralösa Jane Fairchild, som i ställer möter sin älskare i granngodset som ekar tomt efter att bröderna dog i första världskriget. Det som händer sedan ändrar deras liv för alltid – med ekon fram till vår tid. Mödrarnas söndag rör sig mästerligt mellan det tragiska och livsbejakande. Swift har skrivit en stor liten roman om livsval och öde, en roman för alla dem som älskade ATONEMENT, DOWNTON ABBEY och STONER. ‘Mothering Sunday is bathed in light; and even when tragedy strikes, it blazes irresistibly… Swift’s small fiction feels like a masterpiece’ (Guardian) ‘Alive with sensuousness and sensuality…wonderfully accomplished, it is an achievement’ (Sunday Times) ‘Mothering Sunday is a powerful, philosophical and exquisitely observed novel about the lives we lead, and the parallel lives – the parallel stories – we can never know: “All the scenes. All the scenes that never occur, but wait in the wings of possibility.” It may just be Swift’s best novel yet’ (Observer) Översättare: Hans-Jacob Nilsson

Mödrarnas söndag

On a midsummer's night, Paula lies awake, her husband of twenty-five years asleep beside her and her teenage children in nearby rooms, anticipating the coming of the next day, when a revelation will redefine all their lives, in a poignant novel of the fragilities of relationships, the fear of loss and illusions, the bonds of family, and the nature of happiness. By the Booker Prize-winning author of Last Orders. 50,000 first printing.

Tomorrow

These 25 new short stories, written to go together and none of them previously published, mark Booker Prize-winning Graham Swift's return to the short form after 7 acclaimed novels, and affirm him as a master storyteller. Swift's England is a richly peopled country that is both a crucible of history and a maze of contemporary confusions. Meet Dr. Shah who has never been to India and Mrs. Kaminski, on her way to Poland by way of her hospital bed. Meet Holly and Polly who have come to their own Anglo-Irish understanding, and Lily Hobbs, married to a shirt. There's Charlie and Don, who have seen the docks turn into the Docklands; Daisy Baker, who is terrified of Yorkshire; and Johnny Dewhurst, of Leeds, lost on Exmoor. Graham Swift steers us effortlessly from the Civil War to the present day, and the secret dramas contained within walls, rooms, homes, workplaces. With his remarkable sense of place and voice, he charts an intimate geography that moves us profoundly and yet at times makes us laugh out loud. Binding these stories together is his grasp of the universal in the local and his affectionate but unflinching instinct for narrative. England and Other Stories evokes that mysterious body that is a nation by giving us the palpable sense of individual bodies finding or losing their way in the nationless territories of birth, love, sex, aging and death.

A triumphant return to form from the Booker Prize-winner. On an autumn day in 2006, on the Isle of Wight, Jack Luxton, former Devon farmer and now the proprietor of a seaside caravan park, receives the news that his soldier brother Tom, not seen for years, has been killed in Iraq. For Jack and his wife Ellie this will have a potentially catastrophic impact. For Jack in particular it means a crucial journey-to receive his brother's remains, but also into his own most secret, troubling memories and into the land of his and Ellie's past. Wish You Were Here is both a gripping account of things that touch and test our human core and a resonant novel about a changing England. Rich with a sense of the intimate and the local, it is also, inescapably, about a wider, afflicted world. Moving towards an almost unbearably tense climax, it allows us to feel the stuff of headlines - the return of a dead soldier from a foreign war - as heart-wrenching personal truth.

Graham Swift

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