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About
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 it is also a journey into his own most secret, troubling memories and into the land of his and Ellie's past. 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 Graham Swift's love of the local and full of humor and tenderness in the face of tragedy, it is also, inescapably, about a wider, afflicted world. Moving toward 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.
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Reviews
"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."
Times Literary Supplement (London)
"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."
Guardian (London)
"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."
Sunday Times (London)