Wish You Were Here

Reviews

“Swift is as brilliant as ever on the potency of family myth…This novel is often astonishingly moving.”

“Swift weaves a story which is as much a lament for a vanished way of life as an attack on the madness of modernity. With unmistakable echoes of Thomas Hardy and E. M. Forster, he portrays a rural England that is no longer merely under threat, but has been comprehensively vanquished.”

“Like its predecessors, most notably Waterland and Last Orders, Wish You Were Here is a book of quiet emotional integrity…The novel expertly explores the poignant contrast between irrepressible human hope and the constraints within which we live our finite lives.”

“Wish You Were Here is a work of wide, ambitious span…Recounted in pages of affecting, powerfully sober prose…What gives [the novel] a compelling hold is Swift’s real strength, the authenticity that hallmarks his portrayals of people in crisis.”

“The true strength of this book…is Swift’s ability to capture the exquisite poignancy of certain moments: how the memory of a dog’s old blanket on a bed, or the wrinkles on his mother’s wrist as she pours him a cup of tea, open a world of loss for a block of a man who’s never cried, not even in front of his wife.”

“Novelists, being on the whole brainy people, like to write about brainy people, or make their characters better with words than they would be in real life…But as Swift’s novels so brilliantly prove, just because someone doesn’t have a way with words doesn’t mean they can’t experience deep emotion, or be powerfully moved by the forces of history and time…I doubt there is a better novelist than Swift for this kind of story.”

“An acutely observed, compelling read.”

“It begins to read like a thriller…Here Swift parcels out information like an Agatha Christie detective…The pace quickens and quickens. Almost against your will you find yourself racing through Swift’s brief chapters.”

“Like Ian McEwan’s Saturday, or Sebastian Faulks’ A Week in December, this novel draws on events from the news pages…But this emotionally complex novel is not mere reportage…It is [Swift’s] most intimately revelatory novel yet…This is a profound and powerful portrait of a nation and a man in crisis that, for all its gentle intensity, also manages to be an unputdownable read.”

“Booker Prize winner Swift is masterful in his penetrating evocation of the land Jack loves, the many languages a body can speak, and the cavernous unknown concealed beneath apparent intimacy. Brilliantly illuminating the wounded psyches of his characters, circling back to corral the secrets of the past while finding the timeless core within present conflicts, and consummately infusing this gorgeously empathic tale with breath-holding suspense, Swift tests ancient convictions about birthright, nature, love, heroism, war, death, and the covenant of grief.”

“[A] powerful novel about the struggle to advance beyond grief and despair and to come to grips with the inevitability of change. Recommended for fans of Ian McEwan, Michael Ondaatje, and Kazuo Ishiguro, authors with a similar method of slowly developing an intense interior narrative.”

“A novel as contemporary as international terrorism and the war in Iraq and as timeless as mortality, from one of Britain’s literary masters…Profound empathy and understated eloquence mark a novel so artfully nuanced that the last few pages send the reader back to the first few, with fresh understanding.” 

“There’s nothing flashy or flamboyant in Graham Swift’s finely wrought new novel, Wish You Were Here. Its pace is moderate, its tone restrained, but its elegiac mood, so wonderfully evoked by John Lee’s darkly lyrical reading, draws you into the life of Jack Luxton, the last of a dairy-farming family in rural England…You have a sense of this stolid man’s raw emotions, the ache his brother’s loss leaves, his regrets for all that might have been said, all the ‘ifs’ and ‘shoulds.’” 

“An extraordinary novel, the work of an artist with profound insight into human nature and the mature talent to deliver it.”

“Exquisite…Beautifully made…[An] abundance of subtlety, tenderness, and fluid prose.”

“Vivid, emotionally raw…Swift is a writer who clearly revels in dialogue and nuance…Thoughtful and sensitive.”

“Mr. Swift’s writing is as strong as ever, recalling the descriptive beauty of his highly acclaimed Waterland and Booker Award-winning Last Orders.”

“A rich, stereoscopic portrait of the book’s hero, Jack Luxton…Swift knows that in reality we occupy a wealth of experiences, past and present, mundane and memorable. His strength in this fine novel is showing how all those experiences inescapably collide within us.”

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