Graham Swift | Slightly Foxed literary review

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Mothering Sunday, [81] 19; Waterland, [86] 40

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Always the Same River

Jon Woolcott on Graham Swift, Waterland

At my twenty-first birthday party, in a cheap north London pasta restaurant, a friend gave me a copy of Graham Swift’s Waterland, telling me that everyone who studied History should read it. Studying was perhaps a grand word for my efforts at university, but I was intrigued. My choice of subject meant I’d read very little fiction; I was busy reading historians who had initials instead of forenames – C. V. Wedgwood, E. H. Carr, A. J. P. Taylor and my patient tutor, H. R. Loyn – and had found time only to read a smattering of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels. To be given a contemporary novel was thrilling.

Friendship and a Book

Vesna Goldsworthy on Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

The novelist Graham Swift and I first met at a literary gathering on the outskirts of Norwich in June 2005. The university backdrop to our meeting seems strangely extra-territorial in retrospect, as though the campus’s concrete ziggurats had been dropped from Minsk on to a Mediterranean version of East Anglia. The memory is coloured not only by the exotic Babel of writers and languages around us, but also by one of those brief English heatwaves which descends just as the school exams are about to start, a false promise of summer followed by weeks of rain.

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