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for the first time ever, I started an aide memoire of the principals in a sort of family tree but quickly enough dispensed with it as Iwent with the flow and patterns began to emerge. For this is a novel that works primarily on a domestic scale – especially if you count the pub as an extension of the front room.

Locations included the London areas of Peckham and Bermondsey, Eastbourne, Canterbury, Chatham, Margate, and Rochester. Through these musings, Swift has them look back on the lives they’ve led, but with none of the self-consciousness of a written memoir. The prose is constructed with great care, the characters come to life and the various locations (a Bermondsey pub, Canterbury Cathedral, Margate) are vividly evoked.In June 1996, Swift declared that it was a homage to Faulkner's book but there were various differences. This story evoked some vivid recollections of the often stifling and claustrophobic mores of the time. With ‘the last stitch, just in case and by custom, through the poor unfortunate frigging jolly Jack Tar’s nose. It’s in such characters (like Waterland’s Dick) that the petty foibles of the more “mundane” characters around them are exposed, powerfully and cleverly. Set in 1924, in an England still reeling from the loss of young men to the Great War, this elegiac tale offers a haunting portrait of lives in a world in transition.

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 1996 Four men once close to Jack Dodds, a London butcher, meet to carry out his peculiar last wish: to have his ashes scattered into the sea at Margate. Amy’s other revelation, that this visit she is making to see June is to be her last, comes in the final chapter she narrates. Graham Swift builds it all up from the men’s own thought-streams, but this doesn’t stop the form of the multi-voiced narrative being carefully delineated.Without revealing too much, the character of June is the real heart of the novel, even if she is given a relatively small amount of page-time. Nik Powell, head of the independent production company Scala, signed on as an executive producer and during the summer of 2000 brought in German-based Rainer Mockert and MBP to help with the financing. They were caught by Vic, who was at the hospital to collect a body, but he never revealed their secret. It’s typical of Ray that the affair seems to come to an end when Vince starts to live in the van, after fourteen happy weeks. There is little of the strange magic that makes Swift's novel Waterland so remarkable, with its wonderful atmospherics and frequently lurid tales of eels, incest and ale.

For miles, until somebody remarks on it, he’s the one who holds the box containing the jar of ashes. He puts into Amy’s mouth descriptions that combine the realities of thankless piecework—made bearable in her memory by her pretence of flirting with the stony-faced tallyman, so hard she can be suggestive about it—with summer evenings before the war that are made to seem frankly poetic. They are about to begin a pilgrimage to scatter the ashes of a fifth man, Jack Dodds, friend since WWII of three of them, adoptive father to the fourth.

The two acquired the film rights to the book, and Schepisi begin to work on his adaptation, completing the first draft of the script by February 1998.