Sorrow and resentment mingle with passion and regret in Graham Swift’s Booker Prize-winning testament to a changing England and to enduring mortality.
By Graham Swift
The Booker Prize 1996
Graham Swift
It seemed that last orders had been called too late for Graham Swift following his win; during a somnolent radio interview the following day he confessed to having ‘a massive hangover’.
A quietly unassuming novel about four friends disposing of the ashes of another of their group seemed an uncontroversial winner. Several months later, however, an Australian academic noted numerous similarities between Last Orders and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.
Even though Swift, long before, had expressed his admiration for Faulkner’s work and admitted to ‘a little homage at work’ in his own novel, one of the judges, A.N. Wilson, thought the panel had ‘been made to look pretty silly’.
Winner The Booker Prize 1996
- By
- Graham Swift
- Published by
- Picador
Sorrow and resentment mingle with passion and regret in Graham Swift’s Booker Prize-winning testament to a changing England and to enduring mortality.
The Shortlist
Margaret Atwood’s captivating historical fiction about the notorious 1843 murders of Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery.
Beryl Bainbridge’s fictional history chronicles the fate of the privileged passengers of the Titanic on its doomed maiden voyage.
Seamus Deane’s luminous first novel is a haunting account of childhood set in Northern Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s.
By Seamus Deane
The nostalgia in Shena Mackay’s unsettling evocation of a 1950s childhood is stifled when innocence is damaged by domestic violence and sexual abuse.
By Shena Mackay
At a time of political turmoil, the lives of four strangers collide. Rohinton Mistry’s epic masterpiece is set in India in the 1970s.
