More about the book
A triumphant return to form from the Booker Prize-winner. 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.
Book purchase
Wish You Were Here, Graham Swift
- Language
- Released
- 2012
- product-detail.submit-box.info.binding
- (Paperback)
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- Title
- Wish You Were Here
- Language
- English
- Authors
- Graham Swift
- Publisher
- Picador
- Released
- 2012
- Format
- Paperback
- ISBN10
- 0330535846
- ISBN13
- 9780330535847
- Series
- Tags
- Fiction, Contemporary Fiction, Family, Wars, British Literature, English Literature, Psychological novels, Brothers, Tragedy, Farmers
- First published
- 2011
- Original title
- Wish You Were Here
- Rating
- 3.25 out of 5
- Description
- A triumphant return to form from the Booker Prize-winner. 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.