Learning to Swim
Published on 11. July 2019
Book
Paperback/Softback
272 pages
978-1-4711-8754-4 (ISBN)
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
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
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Simon & Schuster Ltd
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 196 mm
Width: 129 mm
Thickness: 22 mm
Weight
248 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4711-8754-4 (9781471187544)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
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Person
Graham Swift was born in 1949. He is the author of eleven novels, most recently Here We Are; three collections of short stories, including the highly praised England and Other Stories; and Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry and reflections on his life in writing. With Waterland he won the Guardian Fiction Prize and with Last Orders the Booker Prize. Mothering Sunday became a worldwide bestseller and won the Hawthornden Prize for best work of imaginative literature. All three novels were made into films. His books have appeared in over thirty-five languages.