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Wish You Were Here

3.28 of 5 stars 3.28 · rating details · 362 ratings · 110 reviews

From the prizewinning author of the acclaimed Last Orders, The Light of Day, and Waterland, a powerfully moving new novel set in present-day England, but against the background of a global "war on terror" and about things that touch our human core.

On an autumn day in 2006, on the Isle of Wight, Jack Luxton--once a farmer, now the proprietor of a seaside caravan park--rec...more

ebook, 336 pages

Published April 17th 2012 by Vintage (first published January 1st 2011)

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Apr 25, 2012 Cynthia rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: books-read-in-2012

A Marriage, several Deaths, a Soldier, and the Dream of Palm Trees.

This is the best book I’ve read so far in 2012. Swift presents an intricacy of loyalties, emotions, and attachments between a boy and a girl who grew up together outside Devon, England. Their families had adjoining dairy farms that barely scraped by during the years of animal diseases that were feared to infect people. The farmers were forced to kill many seemingly healthy animals as a preventative. Many farmers were forced out o...more

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Mar 27, 2013 Shonna Froebel rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is a nice slow novel, with lots of character development and description. Jack Luxton grew up in a farming family in Devon. His one escape was a vacation two summers in a row at a caravan park that his mother took him and his younger brother to. The Luxton's had owned Jeb Farm for generations, and ran it as a dairy farm.
In the present Jack and his wife Ellie run a caravan park on the Isle of Wight, and Jack has just received word from the military that his younger brother Tom, who he hasn't...more

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Mar 10, 2013 Brenda K. rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: patient readers of literary fiction

The following review is from my Books That Matter blog. Please feel free to comment or to check out other reviews!

I can be a little critical of lazy readers, the ones who need the car crash or the dismemberment or the murder on the first page to catch their interest. I understand that spectacular beginnings have to do, on the one hand, with genre (all of the above seem right at home for a murder mystery, but I like my literary fiction to ask more of me as a reader), and on the other hand, with...more The following review is from my Books That Matter blog. Please feel free to comment or to check out other reviews!

I can be a little critical of lazy readers, the ones who need the car crash or the dismemberment or the murder on the first page to catch their interest. I understand that spectacular beginnings have to do, on the one hand, with genre (all of the above seem right at home for a murder mystery, but I like my literary fiction to ask more of me as a reader), and on the other hand, with a publishing industry that is often more concerned with sales than quality. One of the reasons I enjoy teaching an introduction to literary studies at the university has to do with the pleasures of teaching the rewards of patience, of paying attention to the words and sentences on the page as much as to the plot that develops.

I had my (smug, you bet) attitude put to the test with Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here (2011). I had read a couple of Swift’s earlier novels, Waterland and Last Orders (for which he had won the 1996 Man Booker Prize), so I was looking forward to Swift’s nuanced and careful prose. But I admit that I was well past the half-way point in this novel before I began to appreciate it, and that’s asking a LOT of the reader. I’m glad I finished. The cumulative effect of the novel is powerful, but it is certainly not for all markets, and only a perverse stubbornness kept me reading.

Wish You Were Here melds story and the style brilliantly, and that’s the problem as well as the achievement. The central character, Jack Luxton, is an English farmer who sells his farm after a series of hardships, including the devastation of the family’s cattle herd, first to fears of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease), and then to an epidemic of hoof and mouth disease. The loss of the farm signals a loss of the past and of a way of life. When Jack learns that his brother, Tom, has been killed in Iraq, he enters into a period that is defined by obsessive rumination, in which he compulsively relives, rethinks, repeats and revises the past. The novel works as an honest recapitulation of how a man’s mind can process loss and anxiety. We get Jack’s thoughts that make sense and that don’t make sense, the ones that fit into a sensible world, and the ones that are without that world but no less real for him. The thoughts, and thus the representation of those thoughts in Swift’s style, are circular and repetitive, filled with lapses, breaches, leaps, ruptures and return.

It is a painful journey, as much for the reader as for Jack, and yet, having been on that journey we understand, in a way that an easier style would not have made possible, how salvation need not be glamorous to be miraculous.

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Dec 11, 2012 Sandie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Jack Luxton is a farmer. He has grown up on a farm in England that has been in his family for generations. He looks and moves like a farmer; built large and solid and moving deliberately. He has the farmer ethical mindset; he is there to care for others and do his duty by all. It is even more surprising, then, to find that Jack moved from the farm over a decade ago. He is on his final trip back and reviewing his life.

Life was not easy growing up. His father is remote and withholding, setting hig...more

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Sep 04, 2012 David rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I had only ever read one book by Graham Swift and that was his prizewinning "Last Orders". So when his latest novel came out in paperback, I thought it might be worth a try. This is not a fun book. It tells a distressing story of Jack and Ellie, childhood friends from neighbouring farms in Devon. Now married and in their late forties, the death of their parents still haunts them (well Jack anyway), even though their lifestyle has hugely improved having inherited a profitable caravan park on the...more

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Jun 23, 2012 Lisa rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

“A good novel,” Graham Swift wrote in a recent essay in the New York Times Book Review, “is like a welcome pause in the flow of our existence; a great novel is forever revisitable. Novels can linger with us long after we’ve read them — even, and perhaps particularly, novels that compel us to read them, all other concerns forgotten, in a single intense sitting.”

Swift has it right, and has given us another great novel in “Wish You Were Here.” Like his Booker Prize-winning “Last Orders,” his newest...more “A good novel,” Graham Swift wrote in a recent essay in the New York Times Book Review, “is like a welcome pause in the flow of our existence; a great novel is forever revisitable. Novels can linger with us long after we’ve read them — even, and perhaps particularly, novels that compel us to read them, all other concerns forgotten, in a single intense sitting.”

Swift has it right, and has given us another great novel in “Wish You Were Here.” Like his Booker Prize-winning “Last Orders,” his newest novel is an intimate portrait of relationships — family and romantic, complicated and happy and fraught. Triggered by one event — in both books, a death — the story unfolds out over the course of years, a little here, a little there, and soon it feels as if the characters are a part of your life.

Set in England in the recent past, “Wish You Were Here” opens with Jack Luxton, a former farmer nearing middle age, in his bedroom with a shotgun, obviously in a moment of extreme personal distress. What has precipitated his crisis, we don’t yet know.

We learn, though, that Jack and his younger brother, Tom, lost their mother at an early age; that their father was not a warm or loving presence in their lives; that their family dairy farm was devastated first by mad-cow disease and then by hoof-and-mouth. We learn about Jack’s secret-at-first romance with the girl next door, Ellie, who later became his wife. We learn about the two Luxton ancestors who died in the first World War and the medal that one of them won; we learn that early on the morning of his 18th birthday, Tom fled the farm and joined the army, leaving Jack, “the big, obedient brother” behind to explain — or not — to their father. We learn that after Jack’s father died and Ellie’s father died, they gave up their adjacent farms and moved to the Isle of Wight to run a vacation campground Ellie inherited.

And we learn that Tom has been killed in Iraq, leaving Jack the last of the Luxtons.

Tom’s death is the catalyst, setting the story in motion. Jack must go claim his body at a military base, return it to their hometown, and arrange the funeral. Usually a go-along-to-get-along kind of person not given to waxing philosophic, Jack becomes pensive and reflective: “Death, Jack thought … was in many ways a great place of shelter. It was life and all its knowledge that was insupportable.”

The story hops around between time periods and shifts focus among the characters — Jack is the center but others have their stories as well, including the people who bought the Luxtons’ farm — but is never hard to follow. Swift doles out pieces and gradually the whole puzzle takes shape. His writing has a quiet beauty to it, never showy but harnessing the power of the well-chosen word: a sickroom is like “some compartment of disaster”; Jack and Ellie have to decide whether to sell up or be “the proud and penniless owners of massive liabilities.”

I didn’t read “Wish You Were Here” in a “single, intense sitting” — it’s a book to be savored, mulled over, reflected on, not plowed through. Perhaps the best testament to how strongly entwined with the book I felt was that I put off reading the last 50 pages or so for two whole days because I was so afraid of what might happen to Jack — if I didn’t look, he necessarily stayed all right. To have a reader so vested in a character: I can’t think of a much higher compliment to an author’s skills than that.

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Jun 11, 2012 Cindi rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012

I was introduced to Waterland by Graham Swift in a Contemporary Lit class in college. I read it again a few years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. So, I was anxious and excited to read Swift's newest novel Wish You Were Here.

Jack and his wife Ellie own and manage a caravan park on the Isle of Wight. They've grown comfortable in their life but it will all be shaken by the news that Jack's brother, a soldier, has been killed in Iraq. Over the next few days, Jack will confront his past as a farmer, h...more

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Apr 13, 2012 Steve Mayer rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I am a Graham Swift fan, listing Waterland as one of my all time favorites, and this book evokes both Waterland, in its intense sense of place and history, and Last Orders, since like that book it is centered around a death-related ritual. It is an extended meditation on loss: the loss of a brother, the loss of parents, the loss of security; the loss of s farm/family home; and the loss of the English countryside (to nouveau riche Londoners with a yen for second homes). It is about what it means...more

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Dec 20, 2011 Ian Mapp rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: lit-fict

Not to be read if you are after a feelgood hit of the year.

This is typical swift, although not vintage. Sparse writing, melancholy, slowly revealed pasts leading to a big event. Its all here, but never really gels for me. There just isnt enough to hold interest and the story becomes a bore in the middle stages, but maintains interest in closure - as you wonder just what is going to happen.

Swift is attempting three things - telling the story of the last of the luxtons, and two states of the Briti...more

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Sep 28, 2011 Lisa rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: britain, 21st-century, library-book-or-loan

I’ve read a couple of books by Graham Swift: I discovered his Last Orders when it won the Booker (see my review at The Complete Booker) and I read and enjoyed Waterland with one of my online book groups. (It’s on the 1001 Books I Must Read list too). On the strength of that, I bought Tomorrow for the TBR and some Op Shop finds as well : The Sweet Shop Owner and Ever After.

So having established my credentials as an enthusiast, I’m not best pleased about having to admit that Wish You Were Here did...more

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May 19, 2011 Sheenagh Pugh rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: novels

I've liked Swift's short stories very much in the past, finding them told with a masterly reticence and economy (eg "Seraglio"). I was disappointed in this novel because it showed just the opposite qualities.

In the first place it's "writerly" in the wrong way; it shows a lot of fancy writerly tics that in my view just get in the way of a good story (not that there is one, in this case). I can see why he uses tricksy narrative methods like a lot of flashing back and forward, changing viewpoints e...more I've liked Swift's short stories very much in the past, finding them told with a masterly reticence and economy (eg "Seraglio"). I was disappointed in this novel because it showed just the opposite qualities.

In the first place it's "writerly" in the wrong way; it shows a lot of fancy writerly tics that in my view just get in the way of a good story (not that there is one, in this case). I can see why he uses tricksy narrative methods like a lot of flashing back and forward, changing viewpoints etc: he needs to distract attention from the fact that in the actual timeframe of the story, nothing much is happening. But some of these tics get downright irritating, particularly the one that goes "if he'd done such and such, x and y might have happened". This can go on for pages - eg one passage that starts on page 314 with "Had Bob Ireton and Jack found themselves together, soon after the funeral, on what was now the Robinsons' property [...] they might have had a conversation about security". He then goes on for, literally the next 3 pages about what might have happened but didn't - "here, Bob might have looked at Jack carefully [...] but, on the other hand, Bob might have said"... And this is far from the only occasion when this "might have" scenario crops up. Now this device is most famously used in Tobias Wolff's cracking short story "Bullet in the Brain" where he lists all the things his dying protagonist might have thought of, before telling us the one thing that did in fact pass through his mind. There, of course, it's being done as a handy way of showing us the man's whole life; this may not, contrary to the old saying, pass through his head at the moment of death, but thanks to authorial brilliance it does pass through the reader's. It works as a one-off in a short story otherwise crowded with incident, where the slowing-down comes as a surprising and welcome change of pace; I don't think it works as a repeated device in a quite slow-paced novel, where the reader's reaction tends to be "stop telling me what didn't happen and get on with what did.".

It feels, in fact, a bit like a device for filling up pages, as does another whereby he rabbits on (or has his characters do so) for ages about something inconsequential - there's a weird digression at one point about kettles. Of course what seems inconsequential can turn out not to be, but it didn't here.

However, this wasn't the main reason for my disappointment. This is a book with a contemporary setting, dealing with the effects on a farming family of BSE, foot and mouth, the leisure industry, and also with the effects on soldiers and their relatives of the Iraq war (the twin towers make a couple of peripheral appearances too). And it always felt to me as if he'd decided to write a book dealing with these things, and then invented some characters specifically for the purpose of having those experiences - let's see, they have to be farming family, but one of them can run off and join the army so I can get the Iraq war in... They never felt like characters who could live outside the book, rather they were pure narrative constructs to hang the issues on.

Now in one sense this is always so. I'd not long since read Barbara Kingsolver's "The Lacuna", about a man who lives through the Thirties, experiences Diego Rviera's chaotic household and Trotsky's murder, then gets caught up in the McCarthyite purges in the fifties. Of course he's a narrative construct invented for this purpose, but he never feels like that; rather he feels like a real person in whose inner life the author was interested enough to write the story. Swift's characters in this novel never come alive for me quite like that. Indeed the multiple viewpoints sometimes work against him by explaining too much about their motivation, particularly when it isn't credible. If we saw only through Jack's eyes, Ellie's decision not to attend a funeral with him might be mysterious but believable, but we get her viewpoint too and her reasons don't sound remotely convincing. And the climax depends on our believing Jack might possibly do a certain thing and unfortunately I never for a moment believed he would. This fuzzy motivation, I think, can only indicate that the characters haven't been fully realised and that's even true of Jack, the protagonist, who gets nearest to coming alive for the reader.

There is some very polished writing, which occasionally becomes better than polished, ie moving and beautiful. But I found the pace achingly slow, the characters too much their author's puppets and the whole thing too constructed, too "written" rather than imagined and told. (less)

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Jan 10, 2012 Marguerite Kaye rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I absolutely loved this, just couldn't put it down. Very much along the lines of Last Orders (another of my favourites) the narrative flow of this book jumps backwards and forwards in time and switches point of view at key points, which keeps you speculating and page-turning, desperate to know what happened. It was funny, touching, heart-wrenching, harrowing, infuriating, quirky, and overall what it was, was human. I know this is a strange word to use, but I mean it was about being human - flawe...more

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Dec 29, 2012 Will rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I don’t often fly through a book this fast, but this was gripping from start to end. It’s a psychological portrait of Jack, a man under extreme stress as a result of the recent news of his brother’s death, but compounded by his life experience as an isolated and rather bovine character. The full story develops slowly with mounting tension and flashbacks to when he was growing up on a farm , but the ending is not the “expected” one. In fact I put off reading the last pages – as did another GR rev...more

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Apr 02, 2012 Jennifer D. rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: nathaniel, mark, heather

Shelves: 2012-books, arc

This novel is gorgeously written. Heart-squishingly painful at moments and I even had some tears - which happens to me....never. Okay, maybe twice that I can think of in my entire reading life. If you are in a delicate state of mind, it probably isn't the best time for you to read this one. wait until you are feeling a bit heartier before taking on this read.

Swift makes an interesting choice in this story by withholding the precipitating factor from readers for a good, long time. A really long...more

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Mar 26, 2012 Kasa Cotugno rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: location-europe-britain-scotland, genre-crime-thriller, vine, era-post-9-11, themes-family, themes-loss

With With You Were Here, Graham Swift returns to that which he does better than anyone else -- the contemplative novel that probes the innermost secrets of the past and how they affect the present and future. Jack Luxton's transition from running the Devonshire farm his family ran for over 400 years into a proprietor of a caravan holiday site on the Isle of Wight is neither simply explained or treated lightly. Hs inner growth has been shaped mostly by those around him who are now mostly gone. Al...more

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Aug 20, 2012 Philip Lane rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

Not for the faint hearted. There are a lot of deaths in the book, from pets to siblings and throughout the story the whiff of burning piles of cattle leaves a stifling feeling. But these deaths, whilst described in some detail, may be violent and unexpected they are not dwelt on by the author. The deaths themselves are not his interest, he doesn't describe how it felt to die. I was not horrified by the deaths. No, the object of interest is those left behind and their grief and bereavement. The '...more

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May 07, 2012 Susan rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

One of the best books I've read this year. I've read all of Graham Swift's prior novels and I think this is his masterpiece. So many interesting things one could say about this book ... It captures perfectly the end of an era, the loss of a way of life in rural England, and yet it is completely contemporary and universal as well. It reaches so deeply into the mind and heart of a taciturn man facing enormous emotional challenges that you think you know and understand and weep for him. The prose i...more

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Aug 06, 2012 Susan added it · review of another edition

A strange story. After Jack's father supposedly commits suicide and Jack's longtime girlfriend's father dies they marry.

They sell the individual homesteads in England and start a "caravan park".

Later in life Jack's younger brother who joined the British service is killed in action. That precipitates memories for Jack. There is a suggestion that Jack and Ellie fathers' did not die a natural death--Jacks father is supposed to have committed suicide.

It seems that Jack is having second thoughts ab...more

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May 30, 2012 Neil rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Spoiler alert: Man and his wife experience a strain in their relationship after his brother is killed in Iraq. If you read that and thought, "So what's the surprise?" then you've had a micro version of my experience reading _Wish You Were Here_. Every chapter in the early going makes clear that there are Big Secrets that will be revealed but none of them seem that profound. The lives of these characters are interesting, but Swift's emphasis on the secret-and-reveal structure feels unnecessary an...more

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May 16, 2011 Lindsay (Little Reader Library) rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I found this a highly moving, intelligent novel and I hope I can do it a bit of justice in my review. In this novel Graham Swift writes movingly about families and relationships, the secrets that are held inside, the things that go unspoken and that we never know about others, and in particular, even about those closest to us. Jack Luxton and his brother Tom grew up at Jebb dairy farm in North Devon, with parents Michael and Vera. A young Jack sends a postcard from the seaside on the two holiday...more I found this a highly moving, intelligent novel and I hope I can do it a bit of justice in my review. In this novel Graham Swift writes movingly about families and relationships, the secrets that are held inside, the things that go unspoken and that we never know about others, and in particular, even about those closest to us. Jack Luxton and his brother Tom grew up at Jebb dairy farm in North Devon, with parents Michael and Vera. A young Jack sends a postcard from the seaside on the two holidays he takes in his childhood with his mother and brother, in which he writes to his young sweetheart Ellie who lives on neighbouring Westcott farm, proclaiming `Wish You Were Here'. Years later, an adult Jack, in his new life as a caravan park proprietor on the Isle of Wight, receives news that brother Tom, now a soldier, has been killed in Iraq, and so begins, with the occurence of this death, the massive literal and actual return journey for Jack, taking a path backwards into the physical country of his past, and into the buried thoughts and people of his past. Primarily, but not always, focusing on Jack, the narrative drifts in time back and forth with the movement of Jack's thoughts and memories, as they intertwine with the present experiences he is going through.

There is a terrific tension building throughout the novel, right from the scene that is set in the first chapter, in the present, through to the last scene, again in the present.

I felt that Jack had seemed as if he had not entirely been in control of his life, as if somehow others had made the decisions for him by taking their own paths, and he almost has to follow in the wake of their actions. I think this lies at the heart of how much he questions himself and wonders about the events that have shaped his past and put him where he is today.
Graham Swift has touched on the climate of fear post September 11, the resulting war on terror, and, at the core of the novel, the changing outlook for farmers since the BSE and foot-and-mouth epidemics, and how the inhabitants of the countryside has changed.
There is such a sadness hanging over Jack. He is also fearful and begins to imagine some strange scenarios when he returns to the mainland to receive Tom's remains and to attend the funeral. Indeed, the very opening passage of the novel refers to the feelings of madness that seem to have taken hold of his mind at times.

Altogether I found this an engrossing novel about humanity, one that tries to get to the heart of human relationships, between husband and wife, between brothers, and between a father and mother and son, and the heart-wrenching failings really tear at the reader and illustrate the frustration and heartache that is often simmering beneath our skin or buried but lurking in the back of our minds only to be brought fresh to the fore when something stirs them up.

I would like to write more but feel that it would begin to give away parts of the novel that should be left for the reader to discover themselves.(less)

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May 31, 2012 Mcborrelli rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Great little novel existing in the head-space of a 40ish UK farmer after the death of his estranged brother in Iraq. Though the story captures the three days surrounding the repatriation of the dead soldier, it meanders through a generation's work of family history as the protagonist, Jack Luxton, comes to grips with the loss of his brother, and its connections to the deaths of his father and mother, many years before.

The story moves along quickly, and is quite moving at times as it examines the...more

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Aug 04, 2012 Zara Raab rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The dourness of Swift’s characters reminds me of my mother’s people, who came here a few hundred years ago from Devon, England. “Wish you were here” is a blithe expression, but the psychological depth and sheer size of this well-crafted novel make it serious as Greek melodrama, with the standoff between Jack and his wife Ellie resolved in a single afternoon, but only after the complex web of events leading up to it are artfully laid bare. Married a decade, Jack and Ellie grew up on neighboring f...more

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May 25, 2012 Rick rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Graham Swift is a highly skilled writer. His laterst novel " Wish you Were Here " covers a lot of themes but as Leslie Fiedler once observed it all gets sown to love and death. Swift's novel is set on the Isle of Wight and the farmlands of Devon-two places I am unfamiliar with. He focuses on Jack Luxton and his wife Elle-former farmers -now caravan (trailer park) owners. Jack and to a lesser extent Elle are forced to confrontte death of Jack's brother Tom a soldier killed in Iraq. The novel trip...more

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Apr 29, 2012 Sam Sattler rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: literary-novel

Wish You Were Here, the latest from Graham Swift, is one of those novels that take place largely inside the heads of its main characters – when there is much of what might be called “action,” it is usually part of the book’s alternating flashbacks recounting Luxton family history. Swift, as usual, tells his story in methodical fashion, but he constructs here a first-rate drama, layer-by-layer, that will reward patient readers with its ultimate impact.

The novel is told from Jack Luxton’s point-o...more Wish You Were Here, the latest from Graham Swift, is one of those novels that take place largely inside the heads of its main characters – when there is much of what might be called “action,” it is usually part of the book’s alternating flashbacks recounting Luxton family history. Swift, as usual, tells his story in methodical fashion, but he constructs here a first-rate drama, layer-by-layer, that will reward patient readers with its ultimate impact.

The novel is told from Jack Luxton’s point-of-view. Jack and his wife run a tourist campsite on the Isle of Wight, but the couple grew up on adjoining farms in a remote part of the English countryside, and their current lifestyle is nothing like the one they left behind. The couple has much in common, things that should help keep them together but, as Wish You Were Here begins, Ellie is nowhere to be found and Jack stands gazing out his bedroom window, loaded shotgun on the bed behind him, expectantly awaiting her return. What he plans to use the shotgun for is not at all clear at this point, and learning what placed him in that position will require a bit of patience, but it is well worth the reading effort involved.

Jack Luxton, it seems, has witnessed the absolute dismantling of his world and, he is not at all certain that the life with which he replaced his old one makes for all that good a swap. Growing up on a small dairy farm is not an easy life for a boy, but Jack, his brother, and his parents managed to cope well enough for most of his boyhood. Despite the demands of dairy farming (cows have to be milked every morning and they are not happy about waiting for it to happen), Jack can easily picture living on the farm for the rest of his life. The property, after all, has been in his family for generations and, as the eldest son, he feels the obligation to keep it that way. Regrettably, this is not to be.

Jack, Ellie, and their families are relatively simple people; their whole lifestyle tends to make them more insular than those that grow up in more urban areas, but that does not mean they do not feel emotions strongly. The problem is that they do not, at least in this story, seem to be able to express to each other what they are feeling, part of the reason that Jack ends up with a loaded shotgun on his bed.

Much of the satisfaction of reading a Graham Swift novel comes from the way that Swift describes what seems like an unimportant fact or incident only to reveal later, little piece by little piece, what that fact really means and why it happened. It is a little like looking at the picture on a jigsaw puzzle’s box and then putting all the pieces in place – only then, can the impact of the whole be picture felt.
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Apr 11, 2013 Gavin rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Each of the characters in this book is peeled like an onion. At the start, the story and characters are simply a set of boy-meets-girl romance genre characters, but as we get to know them in overlapping chapters . . . we realize that we don't know them at all.

With each chapter, told from differing character perspectives, new information is revealed. The true conflict and development of these very human and identifiable characters allows for insights beyond the initial story. If you begin the no...more

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Dec 28, 2011 Erica rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Interesting but eventually a little too dragged out for my tastes. Ellie and Jack live on neighboring farms as children, become involved as they grow up but remain in their occasional sexual relationship rather than marry so they can help their now-single fathers to work the farms. Eventually the fathers age and die and they sell their farms, buy and run a holiday caravan park at the seaside but it is then that they begin to feel their lives are changing. Jack's brother Tom dies while in the arm...more

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Apr 01, 2013 Helen rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

From the Back Cover: On an autumn day in 2006, on the Isle of Wight, Jack Luxton, former Devon farmer and now the proprietor of a seaside caravan park, receives the news that his soldier brother Tom, not seen for years, has been killed in Iraq. For Jack and his wife Ellie this will have a potentially catastrophic impact. For Jack in particular it means a crucial journey—to receive his brother’s remains, but also into his own most secret, troubling memories and into the land of his and Ellie’s pa...more

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Aug 09, 2011 Kirsty Darbyshire rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: kindle

I loved this - very possibly the best book I've read this year.

All the reviews I've seen seem to concentrate on it being a story based around the return home of the body of a soldier from Iraq. However I don't think that's really the centre of the story. It's certainly a story with a lot to do with death, dying and legacies left behind, but the return of a soldier is only one part of it and not to my mind the most important part. He's just part of the story of the end of a Devon farming family....more

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Nov 04, 2012 Lee Razer rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: contemporary-fiction

Ruminative. So ruminative. Jack and Ellie grew up on neighboring dairy farms in very out-of-the-way North Devon. They both lost their mothers, the dairy cow business went to hell what with the BSE and then hoof and mouth disease, and the only recompense they had in their teenage and young adult years was each other. Lest this sound at all romantic in some sense, it's not very; Jack is the slow silent type without much to say, but it all works well enough. At least for Jack.

Ellie, though satisfie...more

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Sep 16, 2012 Savvy rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

Wish I had been Elsewhere…
As a fan of Swift’s novels in the past, I was very much looking forward to reading WISH YOU WERE HERE.
However, I felt tedium overtake the pace, plot, and cast of characters throughout most of the novel. As much as Swift can be mesmerizing and brilliant in passages, I slogged through what felt much like a slow monotonous and bereaved dullness.
Jack Luxton bottled up as bovine in his sentience symbolic of his cattle.
Ellie, self-centered and unsupportive in her relationshi...more

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About Graham Swift

Graham Colin Swift FRSL (born May 4, 1949) is a British author. He was born in London, England and educated at Dulwich College, London, Queens' College, Cambridge, and later the University of York. He was a friend of Ted Hughes.

Some of his works have been made into films, including Last Orders, which starred Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins and Waterland which starred Jeremy Irons. Last Orders was a...more

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Quotes from Wish You Were Here

“The oak was, of course, a great stealer of the surrounding pasture—its only value to provide shade for the livestock—but it was a magnificent tree. It had been there at least as long as Luxtons had owned the land. To have removed it would have been unthinkable (as well as a forbidding practical task). It simply went with the farm. No one taking in that view for the first time could have failed to see that the tree was the immovable, natural companion of the farmhouse, or, to put it another way, that so long as the tree stood, so must the farmhouse. And no mere idle visitor—especially if they came from a city and saw that tree on a summer’s day—could have avoided the simpler thought that it was a perfect spot for a picnic.” — 3 people liked it

“Not all of it was done by soldiers, or by men. She’d shut her eyes and run her fingers over Jack’s shoulders, down his spine, as a blind person might seek to recognise the shape of something. The shape—the ache in her own flesh—of her love for him.” — 2 people liked it

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