Wish You Were Here

by Graham Swift (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2012

  $3.44

  On an autumn day in 2006, on the Isle of Wight, Jack Luxton, former Devon farmer and now the proprietor of a seaside caravan park, receives the news that his soldier brother Tom, not seen for years, has been killed in Iraq.

  For Jack and his wife Ellie this will have a potentially catastrophic impact. For Jack in particular it means a crucial journey-to receive his brother's remains, but also into his own most secret, troubling memories and into the land of his and Ellie's past.

  Wish You Were Here is both a gripping account of things that touch and test our human core and a resonant novel about a changing England. Rich with a sense of the intimate and the local, it is also, inescapably, about a wider, afflicted world. Moving towards an almost unbearably tense climax, it allows us to feel the stuff of headlines-the return of a dead soldier from a foreign war-as heart-wrenching personal truth.

  `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

  `The novel expertly explores the poignant contrast between irrepressible human hope and the constraints within which we live our finite lives.' The Times

  `Affecting, powerfully sober prose . . . Wish You Were Here is a work of wide, ambitious span' Sunday Times