The Sweet-Shop Owner (27 page)

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-73933-3

The men and women in these spare, almost Kafkaesque stories are engaged in struggles that are no less brutal because they are fought by proxy. The mismatched couple in the title story wages a covert, sexually charged battle for the allegiance of their hapless son. An aging doctor punishes a hypochondriacal patient for his wife’s adultery. A teenage refugee is swept up in the conflict between an oppressively sentimental father and his rebellious son. In Graham Swift’s taut prose, these quietly combative relationships become a microcosm for all human cruelty and need.

Fiction/Short Stories

Set in the bleak Fen country of East Anglia and spanning some two hundred and forty years in the lives of its haunted narrator and his ancestors,
Waterland
is a book that takes in eels and incest, ale-making and madness, the heartless sweep of history, and a family romance as tormented as any in Greek tragedy.

Fiction/Literature

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