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.
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.
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.
