England and Other Stories

In these beautifully crafted stories, Graham Swift—author of the Booker Prize-winning Last Orders—presents a vision of a country, England, that is both a crucible of history and a maze of contemporary confusions. Moving from the seventeenth century to the present day, from world-shaking events to domestic dramas and frequently mixing tragedy with comedy, England and Other Stories is bound together by an underlying instinct for the story of us all: an evocation of that mysterious thing, a nation, enriched by a clear-eyed compassion for how human individuals find or lose their way in the nationless territory of birth, growing up, sex, ageing and death.

Graham Swift was born in 1949 and is the author of nine novels; two collections of short stories; and of Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry, and reflections on his life in writing. With Waterland he won The Guardian Fiction Award, and with Last Orders the Booker Prize. Both novels have since been made into films. His work has appeared in over thirty languages.