Shuttlecock

prentis, The Narrator Of This Nightmarish Novel, Catalogs "dead Crimes" For A Branch Of The London Police Department And Suspects That He Is Going Crazy. His Files Keep Vanishing. His Boss Subjects Him To Cryptic Taunts. His Family Despises Him. And As Prentis Desperately Tries To Hold On To The Scraps Of His Sanity, He Uncovers A Conspiracy Of Blackmail And Betrayal That Extends From His Department And Into The Buried Past Of His Father, A War Hero Code-named "shuttlecock"--and, Lately, A Resident Of A Hospital For The Insane.

Dazzling in its structure and shattering in its emotional force, Graham Swift's Ever After spans two centuries and settings from the adulterous bedrooms of postwar Paris to the contemporary entanglements in the groves of academe. It is the story of Bill Unwin, a man haunted by the death of his beautify wife and a survivor himself of a recent brush with mortality. And although it touches on Darwin and dinosaurs, bees and bridge builders, the true subject of Ever After is nothing less than the eternal question, "Why should things matter?"

"Ever After is explicitly concerned with historical investigation, love, death, family affairs.... It moves quickly, and it vibrates with feeling and thought."—Wall Street Journal

The dazzling new novel by the author of Waterland approaches the riddle of life from the agonized perspective of Bill Unwin, a middle-aged orphan, premature widower, and failed suicide suddenly obsessed by the diaries of his Victorian ancestor, a man whose fall from happiness eerily parallels his own. "He writes like a Henry James reborn after the sexual revolution."--New York Times Book Review.

out Of This World Interweaves The History Of A Blighted Family With The Tragic And Ludicrous History Of The Twentieth Century. Its Alternating Narrators Are A Father And Daughter—each Obsessed With The Other And Irrevocably Estranged—surveying Their Losses And Grievances On Opposite Sides Of The Atlantic.

"a Moving, Ingenious And Often Very Funny Tale That Takes Us Deep Into His Characters' Wounded, Resilient Hearts With Breathtaking Virtuosity...rich, Complicated, Joyful, Arresting."—usa Today

publishers Weekly

``any Doubt That Swift, Whose Waterland Was Nominated For England's Booker Prize, Is One Of The Very Best Young British Novelists Should Be Dispelled By This Beautifully Written, Stinging Study Of A Family Torn Apart By Guilt And Anger,'' Lauded Pw. ``this Is A Powerful Meditation On Global And Familial Violence, Written In Prose Of Unerring Grace And Emotional Precision.'' (oct.)

Dazzling in its structure and shattering in its emotional force, Graham Swift's Ever After spans two centuries and settings from the adulterous bedrooms of postwar Paris to the contemporary entanglements in the groves of academe. It is the story of Bill Unwin, a man haunted by the death of his beautiful wife and a survivor himself of a recent brush with mortality. And although it touches on Darwin and dinosaurs, bees and bridge builders, the true subject of Ever After is nothing less than the eternal question, "Why should things matter?" " Ever After is explicitly concerned with historical investigation, love, death, family affairs.... It moves quickly, and it vibrates with feeling and thought."-- Wall Street Journal Zijn frustratie over de heldenrol die zijn vader in de oorlog speelde en over de druk van zijn autoritaire chef uit een man aanvankelijk in hevige woede-uitbarstingen tegen vrouw en kinderen After a brush with death, Bill Unwin discovers notebooks from a Victorian ancestor that help him piece together his own life with their meditations on the human condition