Learning to Swim
Author: Swift, Graham
ISBN: 9781471187544
Publisher: Scribner UK
Year First Published: 2020
Pages: 272
Dimensions: 7.795 inches x 5.118 inches x 0.748 inches
Format: Paperback / softback
Description:
FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF LAST ORDERS AND MOTHERING SUNDAY, reissued for the first time in Scribner
Graham Swift’s first collection of short stories confirms his power to bring an edge of the extraordinary, the dangerous or the subversive into otherwise familiar, safe, even comforting settings. On a holiday beach, a mismatched couple wage a sexually charged war for the devotion of their literally floundering son. A family doctor, oppressed by his own domestic insecurities, intimidates an apparent time-wasting patient. A zookeeper becomes the keeper of a bizarre fixation . . .
While vividly evoking a recognisable English geography, these startling stories have an eye for the foreign, for the experience of refugees or for less definable zones of bewilderment and strangeness. More than one has a touch of the ghostly. Highly located yet haunted and haunting, they penetrate a hidden world of human dislocation.
‘Graham Swift should be read by everyone with an interest in the art of the short story’ Paul Bailey, Evening Standard
‘A masterful collection of stories’ USA Today
ISBN: 9781471187544
Publisher: Scribner UK
Year First Published: 2020
Pages: 272
Dimensions: 7.795 inches x 5.118 inches x 0.748 inches
Format: Paperback / softback
Description:
FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF LAST ORDERS AND MOTHERING SUNDAY, reissued for the first time in Scribner
Graham Swift’s first collection of short stories confirms his power to bring an edge of the extraordinary, the dangerous or the subversive into otherwise familiar, safe, even comforting settings. On a holiday beach, a mismatched couple wage a sexually charged war for the devotion of their literally floundering son. A family doctor, oppressed by his own domestic insecurities, intimidates an apparent time-wasting patient. A zookeeper becomes the keeper of a bizarre fixation . . .
While vividly evoking a recognisable English geography, these startling stories have an eye for the foreign, for the experience of refugees or for less definable zones of bewilderment and strangeness. More than one has a touch of the ghostly. Highly located yet haunted and haunting, they penetrate a hidden world of human dislocation.
‘Graham Swift should be read by everyone with an interest in the art of the short story’ Paul Bailey, Evening Standard
‘A masterful collection of stories’ USA Today
