England and Other Stories

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.

Read Caroline Baum's Review

Some writers are about dramatic set piece show-stopping scenes written with virtuosic flamboyance. Writers like Franzen, Amis, Eggers and Wolfe come to mind. Some writers prefer to write about the quiet moments of life in between dramas that are so often eclipsed but often more telling in their detail.

Graham Swift is one such writer. He has never gone for big effects, never written look-at-me prose. And yet he is a superb stylist, with a knowing, kind, playful but mild humour, and a deep understanding of character as his latest collection of short stories demonstrates. It is about England now, how much it has changed, how different it is from the country where Swift grew up in every way: in its racial identity, in its aspirations, in its class mobility and newly coined language. Swift is a stealthy social anthropologist and his stories are full of subtlety and gently understated delight.

About the Author

Graham Swift was born in 1949 and is the author of nine acclaimed novels, a collection of short stories and Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry and reflections on his life in writing. With Waterland he won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and with Last Orders the Booker Prize. Both novels have since been made into films. Graham Swift's work has appeared in over thirty languages.