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 bereav...
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Gilbert is an English novelist and editor. In the following review, she discusses the themes and narrative structure of Out of This World.
Fathers stalk through Graham Swift's novels like si...
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In the following excerpt, Higdon offers stylistic and thematic analyses of The Sweet-Shop Owner and Shuttlecock.
Graham Swift's first novel, The Sweet-Shop Owner, establishes the topics, the...
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In the following mixed review, Milne considers the structure and narrative voice of Ever After.
The past may be a foreign country, but Graham Swift's miserable male narrators feel far more a...
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In the following review, Sage examines the themes and structure of Ever After.
Graham Swift's last novel, Out of this World, was a "dry" book—abstracted, diagrammatic. T...
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In the following review, Wall considers the plot and themes in Ever After.
Graham Swift's new novel [Ever After], like its two predecessors, is about a man who wants to reconstruct the past....
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In the following review, Harris offers praise for Ever After.
In 1983 Graham Swift's Waterland brought attention to an esteemed new voice in English fiction. The Guardian called it "t...
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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.
It s...
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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.
How could any co...
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In the following review, Duchêne relates Swift's focus on storytelling, remembrance, knowledge, and family relations in Out of This World.
It cannot have been easy to follow Waterland...
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Carr is an English educator, nonfiction writer, novelist, and author of children's books. In the following excerpt, he offers a mixed assessment of Out of This World, discussing the novel...
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Lee is an English critic, editor, nonfiction writer, and educator. In the following mixed review, she discusses stylistic and thematic aspects of Out of This World, noting, in particular, Swift'...
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An English educator and critic, Parrinder has written several books on H. G. Wells and science fiction. In the following excerpt, he offers a positive assessment of Out of This World, discussing the w...
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Sexton is an American novelist, editor, and nonfiction writer. In the following review, she offers a highly positive assessment of Out of This World, praising Swift's focus on family love, betr...
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In the following essay, Janik, an American educator and critic, discusses the relationship between history and the present in Swift's first three novels.
The publication of three novels with...
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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...
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Graham (Colin) Swift
Critical Review by Harriett Gilbert
Lugubrious and Repetitive
