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“... them have their birthday, their last birthday of that old life.’ In his seven previous novels, Graham Swift has committed himself to writing about ordinary Englishmen (this is his first novel narrated entirely by a woman). His characters are shopowners and teachers, clerks, butchers, undertakers, insurance agents. ‘I am the kind of writer,’ he has ...”

“... in The Waste Land, Pinter with Sidcup in The Caretaker, McEwan with Dollis Hill in The Innocent. Graham Swift knows all about such effects, and knows – as Pinter does – that they will probably now be self-conscious, deliberate dives into the sublime banal. Nowadays a novelist’s characters may themselves be knowingly aware of the effects of ...”

“... In his moving first novel The Sweet Shop Owner Graham Swift illuminated the history of one man through flashbacks on the last day of that man’s life. Through the succinctly evoked provincial decades one of the engrossing features was the difficulty of love and of communication between generations, even within a family – a problem which threatened, at a local level, the transmission of a sense of history or a justification of the past which Swift so perceptively re-created ...”

“... men in felt hats and starched collars walking along a country road, which Sander took in May 1914. Graham Swift is another novelist who, like Powers, is burdened by history, and for whom the central theme of modern life is our own historical self-consciousness. The 20th century, for these writers, is the historical century par excellence. The 19th, by ...”

“... Graham Swift’s new novel, like its two predecessors, is about a man who wants to reconstruct the past. In Waterland (1983) this enterprise was conducted – plausibly enough if rather insistently – by a history teacher who saw in his imminent redundancy more than the demotion of his subject. Cutting back on history meant cutting off adults as well as children from the stories about the world that are among their deepest needs ...”

“... placid affair. On one matter Taylor has quite irresponsibly altered his views. In A Vain Conceit Graham Swift was enthusiastically welcomed as one of an emerging group of younger writers; in After the War Taylor remarks woundingly and in passing that ‘you and I might suspect that the new Graham Swift is ...”

“... relation to each other and the world, is somewhat overshadowed by the melodramatic frame in which Swift sets his novel. The opening pages give us an older Jack gazing from a window through heavy rain at a seaside view, a shotgun on the bed beside him. His thoughts are of the mad cow cull, 9/11, the war on terror and the whereabouts of a certain ...”

“... which is beyond his control, something bound to happen to someone who tries to play God. In Graham Swift’s latest novel Vince remembers thinking that answering questions about what he wants to be is dangerous: making one choice, communing just once with fate, will seal his identity for good. The ‘accident of birth’ he has in mind is that of ...”

“... Of these novels, the one with legs and a long finish, as the wine-tasters say, is Graham Swift’s Waterland, his third. The story – which is at once story and history, erzählung and geschichte – is sustained within, or threaded into, an intricate web of interlocking images. Or rather, to respect its prevailing metaphor, it floats and develops in an amniotic fluid of local, biological and antiquarian detail ...”

“... extract from Staring at the Sun by Julian Barnes (b. 1946), although nothing from Shuttlecock, by Graham Swift (b. 1949), which gives the best description I know of the territory, real and psychological, in which his generation grew up in Britain: What attracted me then about Camber was less its whispering billows of sand and wheeling black-headed gulls ...”

“... who could also be described as preferring doggedness to seduction or pyrotechnics, and that’s Graham Swift. Swift’s 2003 novel The Light of Day, for instance, titrates basic narrative information from the stingiest of pipettes, but the relentless slowness of the additive process only adds to the tension ...”

“... further overgrown withvines. My shadow disappears again.I prefer when it sticks around.I eye the swift cumulus.Why won’t it go on, leave be,hovering again above me now, thenunder. What washappiness it asks almost grazing the exposedroots. Someone must be burningwood. I rememberwhat it was like to make coffee in themornings. I remember mornings. To fall ...”

“... a sort of Derek Raymond autopsy on Margate, appeals to Seabrook, the pulp addict, in ways that Graham Swift and his Last Orders never could. Seabrook takes his Faulkner neat, binge reading, with chasers of Sir Thomas Browne and a dozen ghosted gangland memoirs. As an archivist of the 1960s (Kennedy, Keeler, Profumo), Frewin was the subject of one of ...”

“... expression. An old stream flows alongside. Glimmering tongues promise the vanishing will be swift. It’s a lie. The periphery disappears but I can still feel it, our knowing what’s coming a thicket we got lost in – till the only thing is now – mask my spirit screams – mask now – vacancy not coming fast enough – before we have to traverse ...”

“... red shrimp punctually all along the highs of each upskirting arc – prongs upright, stiff. Swift ticks of sunlight count them out. Who has enough? A little distance back two vultures feeding on a pelican. Later, claws and beak float in the brack. Foam-bits lace-up the edge of the retreat. Something feels like it’s not coming back. In the tidepool ...”