A masterly work from one of our greatest writers, told for the first
time in the third, rather than the first person. It's a true departure
in many ways and is already becoming widely acclaimed as one of his
finest novels yet. 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.
FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF LAST ORDERS AND MOTHERING SUNDAY, and reissued for the first time in Scribner, comes a novel called 'Profound and powerful . . . an unputdownable read' by Scotland on Sunday.
On an autumn day in 2006, on the Isle of Wight, Jack Luxton - former Devon farmer, now proprietor of a seaside caravan park - receives the news that his brother Tom, not seen for years, has been killed in Iraq.
For Jack and his wife Ellie this will have a potentially catastrophic impact and compel Jack to make a crucial journey: to receive his brother's remains, but also to return to the land of his past and confront his most secret, troubling memories.
Praise for Mothering Sunday: '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 'From start to finish Swift's is a novel of stylish brilliance and quiet narrative verve. The archly modulated, precise prose (a hybrid of Henry Green and Kazuo Ishiguro) is a glory to read. Now 66, Swift is a writer at the very top of his game' Evening Standard '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 … It may just be Swift's best novel yet' Observer
Graham Swift was born in 1949 and is the author of nine novels; two collections 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.
