England and Other Stories by Graham Swift
Requirements: Kindle, 314KB
Overview: In Graham Swift’s new collection we find a window cleaner, a barber and a forklift driver; men with unostentatious names such as Mick Hammond and Charlie Yates. They’re fathers, husbands and, above all, worriers, sometimes afflicted with a mild Othello complex, more often tying themselves in knots just because. In one story, newly married Nick writes to his wife to tell her how happy he is. He then worries it’s weird to give a love letter to someone you live with, so he hides it, unable to destroy it, as that doesn’t seem right either.
The situations are dramatic but normal: bereavement, cancer, sex for the first time. They are simply told, with early stories unfolding in a direct, conversational first-person, like an interview with the questions edited out – “as told to Graham Swift”, perhaps. A story about a man who defends a child from a dog is called, simply, “Dog”. These unadorned tales can be heartbreaking. In “Fusilli”, a father at a supermarket takes a call from his son, serving in Afghanistan. Later, when the son’s eventual death leaves the man clinging to this final moment of contact, he returns to the supermarket to buy a packet of the pasta he was holding at the time of the call, intending to keep it as some small solace, secret even from his wife.
Genre: Short Stories
Download Instructions:
Swift-England_and_Other_Stories.mobi
http://destyy.com/wLk1Ok
