An exquisite new collection of stories from the Booker Prize–winning author, about lives shaped and haunted by war.
Here are the soldiers and doctors and veterans, wives and lovers and children, who have been affected in ways both subtle and profound by the cataclysms of our times. In the aftermath of World War II, a young Jewish private, 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 approaches the brink of global disaster. On September 11th, a maid working for U.S. Embassy staff in London wonders if her birth on the day of the Kennedy assassination determined the course of her life. And at the height of pandemic lockdown, a respiratory disease specialist comes out of retirement and is faced with a formative childhood memory.
These stories show history in the making, the reverberations of each personal loss and triumph set across the sweep of decades. Tender, humane, rich with humor, grief and moments of grace and contemplation, Twelve Post-War Tales is a collection of masterpieces in miniature.
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Graham Swift lives in London and is the author of several novels incuding, The Sweet-Shop Owner; Shuttlecock, which received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Waterland, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize and won The Guardian Fiction Award, the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour; Out of This World; Ever After, which won the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; Last Orders, which was awarded the Booker Prize; The Light of Day; Tomorrow; and most recently Mothering Sunday. He is also the author of Learning to Swim, a collection of short stories. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.
He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming
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