Twelve Post-War Tales

by Graham Swift

Overview

An exquisite new collection of stories from the Booker Prize–winning author, about lives shaped and haunted by war

Here are the soldiers and doctors and veterans, wives and lovers and children, who have been affected in ways both subtle and profound by the cataclysms of our times. In the aftermath of World War II, a young Jewish private, stationed in Germany, seeks the truth about lost family members. In the 1960s, a father focuses on his daughter’s wedding even as the Cuban Missile Crisis approaches the brink of global disaster. On September 11th, a maid working for U.S. Embassy staff in London wonders if her birth on the day of the Kennedy assassination determined the course of her life. And at the height of pandemic lockdown, a respiratory disease specialist comes out of retirement and is faced with a formative childhood memory.

These stories show history in the making, the reverberations of each personal loss and triumph set across the sweep of decades. Tender, humane, rich with humor, grief and moments of grace and contemplation, Twelve Post-War Tales is a collection of masterpieces in miniature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593803387
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/06/2025
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

GRAHAM SWIFT was born in 1949 and is the author of eleven novels, three collections of short stories, and Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry, and reflections on his life in writing. With Waterland, he won The Guardian Fiction Award, and with Last Orders, the Booker Prize. Mothering Sunday became a worldwide bestseller and won the Hawthornden Prize. His work has appeared in more than thirty-five languages

Editorial Reviews

“Quite wonderful. Such grace and clarity—I’m filled with admiration." —Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials

“Bravura. . . . Word-perfect. . . . Immensely readable. . . . Swift is a master of dialogue who delights in the possibilities of the human voice. . . . His archly modulated, precise prose, reminiscent at times of Kazuo Ishiguro’s, has lost none of its power. . . . From start to finish, Twelve Post-War Tales is a marvel of the storyteller’s art.” —Ian Thomson, Financial Times

“Wonderful—both heartbreaking and generous. . . . The characters in this collection share their thoughts and memories with the reader as though with a close friend, and the warmth of their confidences balances against their sadness. We feel we’ve been in the trenches with them, even when a story has gone no farther than the living room.” —Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“Setting the seemingly ordinary lives of his characters against the great, tumultuous moments of history—from the Second World War to the Cuban Missile Crisis, September 11th and the Covid pandemic—the Booker Prize winner traces a tender and moving web of connections across decades.” —Financial Times (Most Anticipated Books of 2025)

“These stories, depth charges of love, anguish, resentment, each in their way relating to the effects of World War II, are so good. Swift at his best—and he’s on top form here—has the humanity and wry humour of William Trevor.” —Patrick Gale, author of A Place Called Winter

“Perceptive. . . . Finely tuned.” —Publishers Weekly

“A brilliant, illuminating collection of short fiction, perhaps the author’s best. . . . In Swift’s touching, deeply humane stories, life leaves its mark in mysterious and sometimes-humorous ways. His gift for capturing in revealing detail the interior lives of people coping—or failing to cope—with disappointment gives each of these stories a rare depth.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Affecting. . . . In stark, immediate prose, deployed with utmost patience, Swift holds us close and points to powerful truths.” —Brendan Driscoll, Booklist

From the Publisher

★ 2025-04-04
In his latest collection, Swift probes the complicated lives of Britons young and old living in the long shadow of World War II.

In “Fireworks,” the Cuban Missile Crisis threatens to cancel the wedding of 19-year-old Sophie. People might not show up “if there’s still a situation,” says the father of the groom. To which Sophie’s father answers, “No one’s calling off my daughter’s wedding just because the world’s going to end.” In “Black,” set in England’s East Midlands in 1944, 18-year-old Nora boldly sits next to a handsome Black American airman on a bus and is quickly drawn to him. The friendly encounter, shocking to all aboard, is life-altering in multiple ways for the daughter of a chronic wife-abuser: “This was what she hadn’t foreseen.…That a man can just hit you. Not in that way. Just hit you.” In “The Next Best Thing,” young British private Joseph Caan travels to Germany in 1959 to track the fate of his relatives. He has a creepy encounter with an overly polite functionary who, told that Caan’s Jewish, German-born father was killed in Tobruk as a British soldier, insinuatingly says he was there too—“on the other side, of course.” In “Passport,” an 82-year-old woman living alone in a state of confusion is transported back to when she was 3 and her mother was killed during the London Blitz—a day that left a deep imprint on her but of which she has no memory. “How can we remember that we didn’t have a memory?” she muses. In Swift’s touching, deeply humane stories, life leaves its mark in mysterious and sometimes-humorous ways. His gift for capturing in revealing detail the interior lives of people coping—or failing to cope—with disappointment gives each of these stories a rare depth.

A brilliant, illuminating collection of short fiction, perhaps the author's best.

Kirkus Reviews