Twelve Post-War Tales

An exquisite new collection of stories from the Booker Prize–winning author, about lives shaped and haunted by war

Here are the soldiers and doctors and veterans, wives and lovers and children, who have been affected in ways both subtle and profound by the cataclysms of our times. In the aftermath of World War II, a young Jewish private, 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 approaches the brink of global disaster. On September 11th, a maid working for U.S. Embassy staff in London wonders if her birth on the day of the Kennedy assassination determined the course of her life. And at the height of pandemic lockdown, a respiratory disease specialist comes out of retirement and is faced with a formative childhood memory.

These stories show history in the making, the reverberations of each personal loss and triumph set across the sweep of decades. Tender, humane, rich with humor, grief and moments of grace and contemplation, Twelve Post-War Tales is a collection of masterpieces in miniature.

GRAHAM SWIFT was born in 1949 and is the author of eleven novels, three 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 Award, and with Last Orders, the Booker Prize. Mothering Sunday became a worldwide bestseller and won the Hawthornden Prize.  His work has appeared in more than thirty-five languages