WISH YOU WERE HERE

The Time Out Novel of the Year 'that articulates the thought processes and language of the working classes without condescension or caricature. The slowly unfolding tragedy of Jack Luxton, his wife Ellie and his brother Tom, a soldier fighting in the Iraq War, is mesmerising.' Graham Swift's novels 'have grown organically into social-emotional record of modern English experience' (Independent) in his accurate and moving tale of a changing England in which abstract powers - government, military, economic - kill the spirits and bodies of citizens with an almost abstract brutality. 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 profound 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. Building to a fiercely suspenseful climax, the novel is a haunting and compassionate story that brilliantly transforms the stuff of headlines into heart-wrenching personal truth. It is a novel that takes one man's grief and uses it as a prism for the suffering of an entire nation. 432pp.