Graham Swift is the author of Booker Prize-winning Last Orders, an exceptional novel that inspired an equally brilliant film of the same title. England and Other Stories is Swift’s third collection of stories and it continues down the same cobblestoned laneways of Britain, moving past moors and along frigid Atlantic coastlines. With Last Orders there was a rich, rewarding sense of the past, yet in England and Other Stories that nostalgia is stripped away as Swift turns to the naked present. A range of stories allows Swift to take into perspective more of his country and the world, while remaining true to his ongoing literary themes. There’s an idea of integral friendship that is rare in today’s literature. Mateship as a foundation to life – marriage and children are built on it rather than the other way around. Maybe because for Swift, mateship means culture (of work as much as identity) and we are offered a vivid sense of a bruised and battling society.

The language of the collection avoids literary sensibility in favour of the colloquial, the feeling of tales being told after decades of companionship. If mateship is central to the stories of this book, then it’s through mateship that we connect with Graham Swift. England and Other Stories has its heart in British pubs where there’s a sense that men gather not so much to get drunk and carouse, but to make sense of the world, a world hat not only resists being understood but threatens to convert these quiet places into more Starbucks stores. Isolation and alienation are ever present yet Swift welcomes the reader into his company with stories of community.

Alec Patric