Audiobooks by Graham Swift

Twelve Post-War Tales: 'A marvel of the storyteller's art', Financial Times

"THE REMARKABLE NEW WORK OF FICTION FROM THE BOOKER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF LAST ORDERS, WATERLAND, HERE WE ARE and MOTHERING SUNDAY In the aftermath of the Second World War Private Joseph Caan, a young Jewish soldier stationed in Germany, seeks the truth about lost family members; in the 1960s a father focuses on his daughter's wedding even as the Cuban Missile Crisis brings the world to the brink of disaster; in 2001, while planes fly into the Twin Towers, a maid working for US Embassy staff in London wonders if her birth on the day of the Kennedy assassination shaped her life; and at the height of a pandemic lockdown, Dr. Cole, a retired specialist in respiratory disease, returns to work and recalls a formative childhood encounter with illness and much more. These are just a few of the challenged characters we meet in Graham Swift's Twelve Post-war Tales. Tender, humane, funny and moving, Swift's latest work of fiction displays his quietly commanding ability to set the personal and the ordinary against the harsh sweep of history. It is an outstanding achievement, confirming his status as one of the great, most subtle voices of our age. Praise for Swift's most recent novel, Here We Are 'A magical piece of writing: the work of a novelist on scintillating form.' Guardian 'Here We Are smuggles within the pages of a seemingly commonplace tale depths of emotion and narrative complexity that take the breath away.' Observer 'The book's power comes precisely from the fact that it performs its magic in front of your eyes, leaving nowhere to hide . . . you wonder how he does it.' Financial Times 'With a wizardry of his own, Swift conjures up an about-to-disappear little world and turns it into something of wider resonance.' Sunday Times 'Swift has no equal in evoking the atmosphere of an era while probing human psychology with irony and tenderness.' L'Express, France 'Swift doesn't write, he whispers', Corriere della Sera, Italy "In a dozen pages Swift can embrace a whole life", Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany"

Graham Swift (Author), Alex Jennings, Esther Wane, Joan Walker, Patrick Moy, Tania Rodrigues (Narrator)

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Mothering Sunday

"***LONGLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE*** From the Booker-winning author of Last Orders and Waterland comes a long-awaited new novel. 'Mothering Sunday is bathed in light; and even when tragedy strikes, it blazes irresistibly… Swift's small fiction feels like a masterpiece' The Guardian It is March 30th 1924. It is Mothering Sunday. How will Jane Fairchild, orphan and housemaid, occupy her time when she has no mother to visit? How, shaped by the events of this never to be forgotten day, will her future unfold? Beginning with an intimate assignation and opening to embrace decades, Mothering Sunday has at its heart both the story of a life and the life that stories can magically contain. Constantly surprising, joyously sensual and deeply moving, it is Graham Swift at his thrilling best. Praise for Mothering Sunday: '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' The Observer 'Dazzling . . . a vanished world is resurrected with superb immediacy . . . wonderfully accomplished' Sunday Times 'Stunning . . . It is about the most perfect novel you could wish to read' The Guardian 'From start to finish Swift's is a novel of stylish brilliance and quiet narrative verve . . . Swift is a writer at the very top of his game' Evening Standard 'Exquisite . . . Mothering Sunday shows love, lust and ordinary decency straining against the bars of an unjust English caste system' Kazuo Ishiguro 'Mastery and resonance . . . It's one of the novel's great strengths to be able to shift with such agility between focus scene and lifetime recollection . . . the languid, blissful minutes of March 30, 1924 seem to contain all the succeeding decades' Times Literary Supplement 'A dazzling read: sexy, stylish, subversive' Herald Scotland 'A jewel of a book, a subtle, erotically charged novella suspended between past and future' Hermione Lee 'A work of gold from the subtle pen of the great Graham Swift' Le Monde 'With this novel he captures what it means to be alive' Der Spiegel 'An exquisite novella of love and loss . . . a short yet powerful and intricately layered work . . . every sentence counting and not a word out of place' The Australian"

Graham Swift (Author), Alex Jennings (Narrator)

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Tomorrow

"FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE BESTSELLING MOTHERING SUNDAY AND LAST ORDERS, and reissued for the first time on the Scribner list, this is an intensely moving novel about a night that will change one family beyond recognition. On a June night Paula, a successful art dealer, lies awake, Mike, her husband of twenty-five years, asleep beside her. In nearby rooms their twin teenage children, Nick and Kate, sleep too. The next day, Paula knows, will define all their lives. As dawn approaches, Paula recalls the years before and after her children were born. Her story is both a celebration of love possessed and a moving acknowledgement of the fear of loss, of the fragilities on which even our most inward sense of who we are can rest. Graham Swift's apparently most domestic book is that rare thing in fiction, a novel about happiness, though a happiness that is not all that it seems. An intimate and tender tale of a marriage, a family and a home, it begins to embrace big themes: nature and nurture, the illusory and the real. 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 (Author), Sandra Duncan (Narrator)

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Wish You Were Here

"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 (Author), Alex Jennings (Narrator)

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Shuttlecock

"FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF LAST ORDERS AND MOTHERING SUNDAY, reissued for the first time in Scribner Prentis, employed in the police archives, is becoming confused. His obsession with the plight of his father, a wartime hero now the mute inmate of a mental hospital, is alienating him from his wife and children, while at work he feels under scrutiny from his intimidating boss, Quinn. Gradually, Prentis suspects that his father's breakdown and Quinn's menacing behaviour are related and that the connection is to be found in his father's memoir: 'Shuttlecock'. Shuttlecock is an intense psychological thriller and much more. With poignant force and sometimes dark comedy, it links the secrecies and quirks of domestic life with the enigmas and violence of crime and war. 'A small masterpiece' The Guardian 'Excellent, profound' Alan Hollinghurst "

Graham Swift (Author), Alex Jennings (Narrator)

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The Sweet Shop Owner

"FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF LAST ORDERS AND MOTHERING SUNDAY, reissued for the first time in Scribner For forty years, Willy Chapman has struck a strange but steadfast bargain between the two poles of his life: his beautiful but emotionally damaged wife and the sweet shop he runs on a south London high street. Devoted to each, he has maintained a delicate, precarious balance. Now, on a hot summer's day, he attempts to settle his final accounts and reach an understanding with a third, disruptive element in his reckoning: his angry, unforgiving daughter. Spanning five decades and intricately exploring a doomed family triangle, Graham Swift's first novel already shows the historical scope combined with intense intimacy that will characterise his work. 'A marvellous first novel' New Statesman 'Brilliantly chronicled' The Spectator"

Graham Swift (Author), Alex Jennings, Sandra Duncan (Narrator)

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Making An Elephant

"FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF LAST ORDERS AND MOTHERING SUNDAY, and reissued for the first time in Scribner, a brilliant collection of essays, as well as brand new material, that will delight and intrigue readers. In Making an Elephant, Graham Swift brings together a richly varied selection of essays, portraits, poetry, and reflections on his life in writing. Full of insights into his passions and motivations, and wise about the friends, family, and other writers who have mattered to him over the years, this is a revealing and intimate collection. Kazuo Ishiguro advises on how to choose a guitar, Salman Rushdie arrives for Christmas under guard, and Ted Hughes shares the secrets of a Devon river. There are private moments, too, with long-dead writers, as well as musings on history and memory that readers of Swift's novels will recognize and love. 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"

Daniel York Loh, Graham Swift, Mendez (Author), Alex Jennings (Narrator)

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Learning to Swim

"FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF LAST ORDERS AND MOTHERING SUNDAY, reissued for the first time in Scribner Graham Swift's first collection of short stories confirms his power to bring an edge of the extraordinary, the dangerous or the subversive into otherwise familiar, safe, even comforting settings. On a holiday beach, a mismatched couple wage a sexually charged war for the devotion of their literally floundering son. A family doctor, oppressed by his own domestic insecurities, intimidates an apparent time-wasting patient. A zookeeper becomes the keeper of a bizarre fixation . . . While vividly evoking a recognisable English geography, these startling stories have an eye for the foreign, for the experience of refugees or for less definable zones of bewilderment and strangeness. More than one has a touch of the ghostly. Highly located yet haunted and haunting, they penetrate a hidden world of human dislocation. 'Graham Swift should be read by everyone with an interest in the art of the short story' Paul Bailey, Evening Standard 'A masterful collection of stories' USA Today "

Graham Swift (Author), Alex Jennings (Narrator)

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England and Other Stories

"A collection of new stories from the Booker-prize winning author of Last Orders, and of the Sunday Times bestseller Mothering Sunday. 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; Charlie and Don, who have seen the docks turn into Docklands; Daisy Baker, terrified of Yorkshire; and Johnny Dewhurst, stranded on Exmoor. Binding these stories together is Graham Swift's 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, ageing, sex and death. 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 (Author), Alex Jennings, Beth Eyre, Sandra Duncan (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Light of Day

"A BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS BOOKER PRIZE GEM FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF MOTHERING SUNDAY AND LAST ORDERS, and reissued for the first time on the Scribner list, The Light of Day is both a gripping crime story and a remarkable love story. On a cold but dazzling November morning George Webb, a former policeman turned private detective, prepares to visit Sarah, a prisoner and the woman he loves. As he goes about the business of the day he relives the catastrophic events of two years ago that have both bound them together and kept them apart. Making atmospheric use of its suburban setting and shot through with a plain man's unwitting poetry and rueful humour, The Light of Day is a powerful and moving tale of murder, redemption and of the discovery, for better or worse, of the hidden forces inside us. 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 'A real in-depth study of humanity' Alex Jones, Between the Covers 'I loved this so much. The form is so interesting. The voice is just so clear and there's this dryness to him too' Omari Douglas, Between the Covers"

Graham Swift (Author), Alex Jennings (Narrator)

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Out Of This World

"FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF LAST ORDERS AND MOTHERING SUNDAY, reissued for the first time in Scribner In 1972, Robert Beech, First World War veteran and prominent figure in the arms industry, is killed by a car bomb. The event cuts short the career of his son Harry, a news photographer, and comes close to destroying his granddaughter Sophie. Ten years later, Harry, now working in aerial photography, and Sophie, visiting an analyst in New York, remain scarred and divided by the event. Around their broken relationship and Harry's memories of his truncated career and his father, the novel builds a story that is acutely private yet sweepingly public, at the heart of which lies Harry's lifelong dedication of the camera. Out of This World spans many of the twentieth century's scenes of conflict, but also contains some of Graham Swift's most achingly intimate scenes of personal confrontation-scenes that, powerful and haunting as photographs can be, no photographs can capture. 'Deserves to be ranked in the forefront of contemporary literature' New York Times 'Superb, profound' Sunday Times "

Graham Swift (Author), Alex Jennings, Jane Collingwood (Narrator)

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Ever After

"FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF LAST ORDERS AND MOTHERING SUNDAY, reissued for the first time in Scribner Bill Unwin, an academic of dubious status, has never recovered from the death of his famous actress wife and is now convalescing from a recent brush with his own mortality. He has two tales to tell. One, spanning post-war Paris, 1950s Soho and contemporary sexual and scholarly entanglements, surveys the muddle of his own life. The other, drawn from the notebooks of a Victorian ancestor, is the very different story of Matthew Pearce, a serious-minded man whose happiness is destroyed by his compulsive search for truth. Bill's recollections of his beautiful wife, his wayward mother and his philandering stepfather, his wry reflections on his present plight and his unexpected bond with the forgotten Matthew combine to form a potent and moving mental quest. Embracing two centuries and a host of subjects-from ballet dancers and prehistoric beasts to the bewildering persistence of love-it asks nothing less than the eternal question: 'Why should things matter?' 'A perfect piece of literary art' The Spectator 'Masterfully done' Washington Post "

Graham Swift (Author), Alex Jennings (Narrator)

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