Last Orders

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Critic reviews

'Readers should be in no doubt that Last Orders is an extremely fine novel, a surpassing testament to Swift’s vibrant and powerful gifts.'

'An extraordinary achievement, a novel that effortlessly combines the tragic and the comic in human experience, the pathos and the bathos of ordinary lives… Swift never puts a foot wrong. And he has succeeded in elevating the demotic to an elegiac level of which a Wordsworth could only dream: here is language such as men do use, and it proves flexible and wonderfully expressive.'

'Last Orders is not only a triumph for contemporary British fiction, it is a triumph for the hypnotic power of vernacular speech in its ability to create honest, lasting art out of life itself. Swift’s inspired use of natural speech rhythms throughout the novel is remarkable and virtually flawless…Swift has given these sad, angry and human individuals voices and lives so compellingly convincing that the reader comes to know them with a depth of intimacy fiction seldom achieves.'

'A triumph of quiet authenticity: a fine study of a group of characters, partly shaped by a particular time and place, silhouetted against universals of life and death; a novel that unflinchingly contemplates human perishability and that also pays unsentimental tribute to human resilience.'

'A triumph…a story about the most fundamental things of all.'

'Graham Swift shifts his masterful perspective on life’s fragility to the working-class men of Bermondsey…With Swift’s unerring empathy and wit, the voices never fail; to be true to life.'

'Last Orders is a stunning book whose principal achievement is to confer a lyrical shape and dignity on ordinary people’s thoughts.'

'The accuracy is of eye and ear for visual details and the cadences of ordinary speech; but it goes beyond the merely meticulous to a sort of emotional perfect pitch.'

'What is exceptional about this novel, apart from the marvellous prose—at once deceptively simple yet elegiac—is its visual quality: memory itself takes on a physical shape as the tale is told…It is as though Swift has brought to life the silent figures in a vast fresco on some lost wall of an old English church.'

'The novel’s hero is the English language as spoken by ordinary people. Swift’s own voice never interposes. Yet the effect is profoundly elegiac, proverbially wise, as rhythmic as the surge of waves. Shakespeare occasionally gives lower-class characters speeches that shame the high-ups by their gentleness or nobility. But here that effect is carried through a whole book. Cockney speech becomes a vehicle for nuance and tenderness. If language reflects the temper of its people, we should be proud of this book’s language—or proud of the generation, now passing that spoke it.'

'A book to match his masterpiece, Waterland. Last Orders confirms his reputation as one of the great contemporary chroniclers of landscape and memory.'

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An amazing reflection of lives shared. And if you are from Bermondsey even more enjoyable