Graham Swift is a spellbinding storyteller whose primary concerns, in his novels, are the experience of loss and the ways in which human beings try to come to terms with loss. Real and symbolic bereavements haunt his work: the death or estrangement of...

Reviewing Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men in today's New York Times, reviewer Michiko Kakutani laments that the novel's "lugubrious passages...gain ascendency as the book progresses." And Kakutani knows from ascendant lugubriousness. Six days earlier, the Pulitzer-winning critic labeled John Irving's latest work, Until...

In the following essay, Janik, an American educator and critic, discusses the relationship between history and the present in Swift's first three novels.

Mantel is an English novelist and critic. In the following review, she examines characterization and voice in Ever After as well as the novel's relation to Swift's earlier works.

In the following review of Ever After, Levenson discusses the novel's focus on academia, its nationalistic outlook, and its thematic relation to Swift's other novels.