Twelve Post-War Tales – Swift Graham (2025)

THE REMARKABLE NEW WORK OF FICTION FROM THE BOOKER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF LAST ORDERS, WATERLAND, HERE WE ARE and MOTHERING SUNDAY 'The Booker Prize winner traces a tender and moving web of connections across decades', Financial Times 'A brilliant, illuminating collection of short fiction, perhaps the author's best', Kirkus 'These stories, depth charges of love, anguish, resentment, each in their way relating to the effects of WW2, are so good. Swift at his best - and he's on top form here - has the humanity and wry humour of William Trevor' Patrick Gale In the aftermath of the Second World War Private Joseph Caan, a young Jewish soldier stationed in Germany, seeks the truth about lost family members; in the 1960s a father focuses on his daughter's wedding even as the Cuban Missile Crisis brings the world to the brink of disaster; in 2001, while planes fly into the Twin Towers, a maid working for US Embassy staff in London wonders if her birth on the day of the Kennedy assassination shaped her life; and at the height of a pandemic lockdown, Dr. Cole, a retired specialist in respiratory disease, returns to work and recalls a formative childhood encounter with illness and much…