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Books

You’ll never look at dried pasta in the same way again

A review of England and Other Stories, by Graham Swift. These masterful tales about loss and absence conspire to bittersweet ends

12 July 2014

9:00 AM

12 July 2014

9:00 AM

England and Other Stories Graham Swift

Simon & Schuster, pp.288, £16.99, ISBN: 9781471137396

A calculated ordinariness unites the protagonists in Graham Swift’s new collection of short stories. In each of these mini fictions, as in his novels, Swift revisits his conceit of the narrator as man (or woman) on the Clapham omnibus. Invariably he endows these blank ciphers with aspects of the extraordinary — percipience, insight or understanding — or exposes them to feelings and events which place them in extraordinary positions and offer them opportunities to behave remarkably while remaining apparently run of the mill.

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