John Self

Cosy, comforting and a bit inconsequential: Here We Are, by Graham Swift, reviewed

Set largely in 1950s Brighton, this backward-looking novel can feel as though it were written in that decade too

issue 29 February 2020

There’s something — isn’t there? — of the literary also-ran about Graham Swift. He was on Granta’s first, influential Best of Young British Novelists list in 1983, and he won the Booker Prize in 1996, but he has never attained the public-face

status of his contemporaries. That may not be so surprising, given who those publicity-hoovering contemporaries are, Amis, Barnes, McEwan and Rushdie among them.

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