Perhaps more than any other writer working today, Graham Swift has a knack of crafting stories that sneak up on you. In his Booker-winning Last Orders, there was no high concept and no stylistic trickery. But by the end the cumulative emotional impact was overwhelming, as you belatedly realise how invested you had become in these seemingly unremarkable people going about their unremarkable lives.
This new short story collection has 25 stories imbued with that same deceptive brilliance, pared down vignettes from a literary alchemist who somehow combines several seemingly ordinary ingredients into something that touches profundity.
