Waterland

Shortlisted for the 1983 Booker prize, winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize. Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the story-telling animal. Tom Crick is a passionate teacher, but before he is forced into retirement by scandal, he has one last history lesson to deliver: his own. Spanning more than 200 years in the lives of its haunted narrator and his ancestors, Waterland is a visionary tale of England's mysterious Fen country. Taking in eels and incest, ale-making and madness, the discovery of a body and a tragic family romance, this is an extraordinary novel about the heartless sweep of history and man's changing place within it. In the years since its first publication in 1983, Graham Swift's Waterland has established itself as a much-loved classic of twentieth-century British literature. It was shortlisted for the Booker prize, won the Guardian Fiction Prize and has been adapted into a film starring Jeremy Irons and Ethan Hawke. Superbly done: WATERLAND appropriates the Fens as Moby Dick did whaling or Wuthering Heights the moors. This is a beautiful, serious and intelligent novel, admirably ambitious and original. Observer Perfectly controlled, superbly written, and, as they used to say, riveting. WATERLAND is original, compelling and narration of the highest order. Guardian WATERLAND is a quite brilliant novel, so good that whether Graham Swift wins the booker Prize or not is in a sense a matter of little consequence. Daily Telegraph Positively Faulknerian in its concentration on murder, incest, guilt and insanity. The brooding sense of place as a shaping force in the novel's action is as powerful as Hardy's Wessex or Dickens's London. Time Out WATERLAND has the air of a novel classically at ease in its chosen, and uniquely particular, field of reference...Swift takes on and refracts a varied tradition: the family saga, the business saga, the novel of provincial life...and lays an unpredictable claim on a resonant area of life which he has made unequivocally his own. Times Literary Supplement A 300-page tour de force...A burst of exuberant fictive energy. Evening Standard A gothic family saga, a detective story and a philosophical meditation on the nature and uses of history...Rich, ingenious, inspired. New York Times WATERLAND is a formidably intelligent book animated by an impressive, angry pity at what human creatures are capable of doing to one another in the name of love and need...the most powerful novel I have read for some time. New York Review of Books Graham Swift's novel teems with energy, fertility, violence, madness...stunning. Washington Post Astonishing...an overwhelming success...the writing is fluid and earthy, eerie and realistic, complex and simple all at once. San Francisco Chronicle Mr Swift's first novel to be published in America introduces us to an artist doing almost everything right... A taut, exciting tale given resonance by the author's provocative and pungent meditations. Wall Street Journal A masterpiece...intellectually bold, provocative and challenging. The Nation Powerful, unforgettable...a stunning, wholly original work. Newsday A virtuoso performance. USA Today