Last Orders

Sorrow and resentment mingle with passion and regret in Graham Swift’s Booker Prize-winning testament to a changing England and to enduring mortality.

"A beautiful book…a novel that speaks profoundly of human need and tenderness. Even the most cynical will be warmed by it."  –  San Francisco Chronicle

Four men gather in a London pub. They have taken it upon themselves to carry out the last orders of Jack Dodds, master butcher, and deliver his ashes into the sea. For reasons she does not disclose, Jack’s widow, Amy, declines to join them. As the men drive towards the fulfilment of their mission, their errand becomes an extraordinary journey into their collective and individual pasts.

"Swift has involved us in real, lived lives…Quietly, but with conviction, he seeks to affirm the values of decency, loyalty, love."  –  New York Review of Books

“Swift is surely one of England’s finest living novelists….The tale he tells is as affecting as it is convincing…. Quietly, but with conviction, he seeks to reaffirm the values of decency, loyalty, love.”  -  The New York Review of Books

Graham Swift is the author of eleven novels and two collections of short stories. His work includes the highly acclaimed England and Other Stories, and Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry and reflections on his life in writing. His novel Mothering Sunday became an international bestseller and won The Hawthornden Prize for best work of imaginative literature. With Waterland, he won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and with Last Orders the 1996 Booker Prize. Both novels were made into films.