England and Other Stories
and Other Stories
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
From the Booker Prize–winning author of Last Orders and Wish You Were Here, his first new book of short fiction in nearly thirty years: beautifully crafted, piercingly observant stories that 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; meet Holly and Polly, who have come to their own Anglo-Irish understanding, and Charlie and Don, who have seen the docks turn into Docklands; Daisy Baker, who is terrified of Yorkshire; and Johnny Dewhurst, stranded on Exmoor. Graham Swift steers us effortlessly from the seventeenth century to the present day, from world-shaking events to the secret dramas lived out in rooms, workplaces, homes. With these open-eyed, eloquent and often comic stories, Swift charts a human geography that moves us profoundly.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Man Booker winner Swift (Last Orders) sets his eye on the mutterings and putterings of everyday English folk in his first story collection in nearly 30 years. Spanning the time of the English Civil War in the mid-17th century to the present day, each of the 25 vignettes explores a simple theme divorce and separation, death and grief, lust and longing in unadorned prose and in just a few pages. "Remember This" has a young man penning a love note to his new wife after a day spent signing their wills; the undelivered letter has an unintended effect on their relationship. "Fusilli" finds a father stranded in a supermarket pasta aisle, mourning his soldier son's death in Afghanistan. In "The Best Days," a man at a funeral looks back at his first sexual encounter, with a school friend's mother. Not all Swift's choices are perfect some, such as the widow's preoccupation with washing her dead soldier husband's shirt in "Was She the Only One," or the old man's remembrance of his dead wife after receiving a terminal cancer prognosis in "I Live Alone," are heartbreakingly intimate, but others, such as the circular "Going Up in the World," are underdeveloped at best. A uniting factor throughout is Swift's strong sense of place and the idea that life can be transformed in a moment.
