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Wish You Were Here
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Published:
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group 2012
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Description
From the prizewinning author of the acclaimed Last Orders, The Light of Day, and Waterland, a powerfully moving new novel set in present-day England, but against the background of a global "war on terror" and about things that touch our human core.
 
On an autumn day in 2006, on the Isle of Wight, Jack Luxton—once a farmer, now the proprietor of a seaside caravan park—receives the news that his brother Tom, not seen for years, has been killed in combat in Iraq. The news will have its far-reaching effects for Jack and his wife, Ellie, 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 of his most secret, troubling memories. A gripping, hauntingly intimate, and compassionate story that moves toward a fiercely suspenseful climax, Wish You Were Here translates the stuff of headlines into heartwrenching personal truth.
This eBook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.
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Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
Street Date:
04/17/2012
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780307957665
ASIN:
B005O1BY8C
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Graham Swift. (2012). Wish You Were Here. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Graham Swift. 2012. Wish You Were Here. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Graham Swift, Wish You Were Here. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Graham Swift. Wish You Were Here. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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        Graham Swift lives in London and is the author of eight previous novels: The Sweet-Shop Owner; Shuttlecock, which received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Waterland, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize and won The Guardian Fiction Award, the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour; Out of This World; Ever After, which won the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; Last Orders, which was awarded the Booker Prize; The Light of Day; and, most recently, Tomorrow. He is also the author of Learning to Swim, a collection of short stories, and Making an Elephant, a nonfiction book. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.

         

        This ebook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.

      • name: Graham Swift
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Vintage
publishDate
2012-04-17T00:00:00-04:00
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title
Wish You Were Here
fullDescription
From the prizewinning author of the acclaimed Last Orders, The Light of Day, and Waterland, a powerfully moving new novel set in present-day England, but against the background of a global "war on terror" and about things that touch our human core.
 
On an autumn day in 2006, on the Isle of Wight, Jack Luxton—once a farmer, now the proprietor of a seaside caravan park—receives the news that his brother Tom, not seen for years, has been killed in combat in Iraq. The news will have its far-reaching effects for Jack and his wife, Ellie, 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 of his most secret, troubling memories. A gripping, hauntingly intimate, and compassionate story that moves toward a fiercely suspenseful climax, Wish You Were Here translates the stuff of headlines into heartwrenching personal truth.
This eBook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.
reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: Michael Patrick Brady, The Boston Globe
      • content: "Vivid, emotionally raw . . . Swift is a writer who clearly revels in dialogue and nuance, and in Jack he has crafted a marvelously rich character whose quiet, outwardly closed-off nature belies profound internal turmoil. . . . Thoughtful and sensitive."
      • premium: False
      • source: Evelyn Beck, Library Journal
      • content: "Powerful . . . This perfectly titled novel is about longing for the people in our lives who have died . . . Like Swift's Waterland, this book explores the ways the past haunts us, and, like his Booker Prize–winning Last Orders, it uses a death as a provocation for the examination of self and country . . . Recommended for fans of Ian McEwan, Michael Ondaatje, and Kazuo Ishiguro."
      • premium: False
      • source: Paul Dunn, The Times (London)
      • content: "Part ghost story, part whodunit, part tour d'horizon of a nation that seems to have lost faith in tradition and history, it is also a deeply human tale about a man driven to the edge. Praise be for a serious novel that dares to look current affairs in the face."
      • premium: False
      • source: Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred)
      • content: "A subtly powerful novel . . . Booker Prize winner Swift is masterful in his penetrating evocation of the land Jack loves, the many languages a body can speak, and the cavernous unknown concealed beneath apparent intimacy. Brilliantly illuminating the wounded psyches of his characters, circling back to corral the secrets of the past while finding the timeless core within present conflicts, and consummately infusing this gorgeously empathic tale with breath-holding suspense, Swift tests ancient convictions about birthright, nature, love, heroism, war, death, and the covenant of grief. Readers enthralled by Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan will queue up for Swift's virtuoso novel."
      • premium: False
      • source: Kirkus Reviews (starred)
      • content: "A novel as contemporary as international terrorism and the war in Iraq and as timeless as mortality, from one of Britain's literary masters. 'The past is past, and the dead are the dead,' was the belief of the strong-willed Ellie, whose husband, Jack, a stolid former farmer, is the protagonist of Swift's ninth and most powerful novel. As anyone will recognize who is familiar with his prize-winning masterworks, such a perspective on the past is in serious need of correction, which this novel provides in a subtly virtuosic and surprisingly suspenseful manner. It's a sign of Swift's literary alchemy that he gleans so much emotional and thematic richness from such deceptively common stock . . . Profound empathy and understated eloquence mark a novel so artfully nuanced that the last few pages send the reader back to the first few, with fresh understanding."
      • premium: False
      • source: The Times
      • content: "Like its predecessors, most notably Waterland and Last Orders, Wish You Were Here is a book of quiet emotional integrity . . . The novel expertly explores the poignant contrast between irrepressible human hope and the constraints within which we live our finite lives."
      • premium: False
      • source: Sunday Express
      • content: "Swift is as brilliant as ever on the potency of family myth . . . This novel is often astonishingly moving."
      • premium: False
      • source: The Bookbag
      • content: "I cannot tell you exactly how long after I finished this book that I sat, holding it, in stunned silence for--but it was light when I finished it and dark when I put it down. Some books can do that to you. This is one of them . . . Jack is a sort of Heathcliff type of character . . . Totally captivating . . . There's such a beautiful tone to the writing and it's so moving that I cannot imaging it failing to move anyone . . . Swift has already won one Man Booker prize--this deserves another nomination."
      • premium: False
      • source: Express
      • content: "Swift's best since Waterland . . . It begins to read like a thriller . . . Here Swift parcels out information like an Agatha Christie detective . . . The pace quickens and quickens. Almost against your will you find yourself racing through Swift's brief chapters."
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        Starred review from May 21, 2012
        Swift's stunning new novel (after Light of Day) begins with deceptive slowness, detailing the lives of Jack and Ellie, the English husband-and-wife proprietors of a trailer park on the Isle of Wight. Jack and his brother Tom grew up on a dairy farm, but after mad cow disease decimates the livestock, their father commits suicide and the brothers grow apart—Tom enlists and goes off to fight in Iraq, while Jack and Ellie built a happy, if quiet, existence. But when a letter from the Ministry of Defence arrives—addressed to the old farm and rerouted "by someone with a long memory" to the Isle of Wight—Jack learns that the burden of repatriating his brother's remains has fallen on his shoulders, a responsibility that will cause Jack to confront the complexities of "life and all its knowledge," and the sheltering peace of death. Swift (Last Orders) creates an elegant rawness with language that carries the reader through several layers of Jack's consciousness at once—his lonely past, his uncertain future, and the ways in which his father and his brother both refuse to leave him alone, despite how long they've been gone.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        February 15, 2012
        A novel as contemporary as international terrorism and the war in Iraq and as timeless as mortality, from one of Britain's literary masters. "The past is past, and the dead are the dead," was the belief of the strong-willed Ellie, whose husband, Jack, a stolid former farmer, is the protagonist of Swift's ninth and most powerful novel. As anyone will recognize who is familiar with his prize-winning masterworks (Last Orders, 1996, etc.), such a perspective on the past is in serious need of correction, which this novel provides in a subtly virtuosic and surprisingly suspenseful manner. It's a sign of Swift's literary alchemy that he gleans so much emotional and thematic richness from such deceptively common stock. Jack and Ellie have grown up together in the British farm country, and their marriage is practically inevitable once both are on their own. Jack's mother died when he was a boy; Ellie's left home for another man. Jack's brother, Tom, eight years younger but in many ways more worldly and self-assertive, forsakes the farm life to join the army as soon as he can. The fathers of Jack and Ellie both die; Tom remains out of contact for more than a decade. At Ellie's insistence, they sell their property in order to run a seaside vacation park she has inherited. Every winter the childless couple takes a Caribbean vacation. When Tom dies in Iraq, Jack must deal with the arrangements. He cancels the annual vacation and his marriage all but unravels. The minister who had handled the funeral of Jack's father and now his brother knows that the eulogy needs to be "as little and simple as possible...as simple as possible being really the essence of the thing." Swift somehow cuts to the essence of both a family's legacy and the modern malaise through the reticent Jack, who comes to terms with the realization that "all the things that had once been dead and buried had come back again."Profound empathy and understated eloquence mark a novel so artfully nuanced that the last few pages send the reader back to the first few, with fresh understanding.

        COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        Starred review from April 1, 2012

        This perfectly titled novel is about longing for the people in our lives who have died. Taking place over just a few days, it focuses on Jack Luxton's journey to retrieve the remains of his brother Tom, a soldier who died in Iraq. The brothers grew up on a farm in the British countryside, and hovering over the story is the specter of mad cow disease on one end and terror (both political and personal) on the other. Madness and terror certainly infect Jack, who has suffered the loss of nearly everyone he loves. The question that propels the action is whether he will ultimately destroy himself as well. Like Swift's Waterland, this book explores the ways the past haunts us, and, like his Booker Prize-winning Last Orders, it uses a death as a provocation for the examination of self and country. VERDICT Swift has written a slow-moving but powerful novel about the struggle to advance beyond grief and despair and to come to grips with the inevitability of change. Recommended for fans of Ian McEwan, Michael Ondaatje, and Kazuo Ishiguro, authors with a similar method of slowly developing an intense interior narrative. [See Prepub Alert, 9/30/11.]--Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC

        Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

      • premium: True
      • source: Booklist
      • content:

        Starred review from February 15, 2012
        Jack meant it when he wrote, Wish you were here, on a postcard to Ellie, the girl who lived on the adjacent Devon family farm, a seemingly banal sentiment that gains gravitas as this subtly powerful novel unfolds. A stoic adolescent close to his mother and protective of his younger, quicksilver brother, Tom, Jack became a large man of few words. He toughed it out with his irascible father after his mother died, the mad-cow catastrophe plunged their dairy farm into hopeless debt, and Tom ran off to join the army. Years later, Jack and Ellie are living on the Isle of Wight when Jack learns that Tom has been killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb, a loss that hits their house-of-cards marriage with percussive force. Booker Prize winner Swift is masterful in his penetrating evocation of the land Jack loves, the many languages a body can speak, and the cavernous unknown concealed beneath apparent intimacy. Brilliantly illuminating the wounded psyches of his characters, circling back to corral the secrets of the past while finding the timeless core within present conflicts, and consummately infusing this gorgeously empathic tale with breath-holding suspense, Swift tests ancient convictions about birthright, nature, love, heroism, war, death, and the covenant of grief. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Supported by vigorous promotion, Swift's first novel in five years may well rekindle the interest created by his Booker-winning Tomorrow and Booker-shortlisted Waterland.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

popularity
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From the prizewinning author of the acclaimed Last Orders, The Light of Day, and Waterland, a powerfully moving new novel set in present-day England, but against the background of a global "war on terror" and about things that touch our human core.
 
On an autumn day in 2006, on the Isle of Wight, Jack Luxton—once a farmer, now the proprietor of a seaside caravan park—receives the news that his brother Tom, not seen for years, has been killed in combat in Iraq. The news will have its far-reaching effects for Jack and his wife, Ellie, 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 of his most secret, troubling memories. A gripping, hauntingly intimate, and compassionate story that moves toward a fiercely suspenseful climax, Wish You Were Here translates the stuff of headlines into heartwrenching personal truth.
This eBook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.
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