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
