Wish You Were Here - Hardcover

'Wish You Were Here ... is a book of quiet emotional integrity ... Swift is a melancholy and compassionate writer. The mood of his new novel is one of hard-won resilience. Wish You Were Here is a title that might be read as a plea, an order, or an expression of fact. The novel expertly explores the poignant contrast between irrepressible human hope and the constraints within which we live our finite lives.' --Ruth Scurr, The Times

'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.' --Scotland on Sunday

'Affecting, powerfully sober prose. Again, Swift unobtrusively excels at capturing the unshowy stoicism of ordinary people coping with tragedy and the tactful decency with which others help them to do so . . . Wish You Were Here is a work of wide, ambitious span . . . What gives it a compelling hold is Swift's real strength, the authenticity that hallmarks his portrayal of people in crisis' --Peter Kemp, Sunday Times Culture

'I doubt there is a better novelist than Swift for this kind of story . . . The great thing about Swift is the way he takes the elements of melodrama but uses them in a calm, unostentatious and utterly plausible way. In doing so he gets to the heart of people. Serious rural novels such as this remind one of Thomas Hardy . . . in the end, the very end of this extraordinary novel he treats [his characters] with pure compassion.' --Nicholas Lezard, Evening Standard

'Swift's portrait of this staunch, stoical man attempting to reconcile mourning with memory is acutely, poetically honest.' --Marie Claire

`Single-minded, gimmick-proof, Swift's fiction has paid unswerving attention, in both the fine detail of his prose and the wide architecture of his forms, to what the critic Raymond Williams called "structures of feeling". These novels have grown organically into a social-emotional record of modern English experience sensed on the pulse, on the tongue - in the heart...Wish you were here burns with a sombre, rather than a pyrotechnic flame. Stick with it; stay close to its hearth. Like the gruff and saturnine folk within it, this novel takes some getting to know - but more than rewards the effort'
--Independent

`Unafraid of emotion, though without a moment of sentimentality, Swift brilliantly conveys the confusion of a man and wife trapped by their unspoken fears and cornered into a life that for one at least feels like banishment' --Sunday Herald

`Swift is on top form and has created rural characters as memorable as those in his magnificent third novel' --Oxford Times

`Graham Swift is an exemplary tour guide of unknown English Lives, a penetrating thinker, a wonderful writer of dialogue and description, a nimble craftsman' --Telegraph Review

`The novel has a small cast and little in the way of dramatic incident - though what there is strong enough to be shocking. Yet this is a full and rich novel and one which demands and holds the reader's attention from beginning to end. It is capable of enlarging and deepening our understanding of those mysterious beings - other people'
--The Scotsman

A masterly work from one of our greatest writers.