Learning to Swim

Graham Swift’s taut prose style, natural gift for characterization and tight grasp of the details and complexities of real life combine beautifully in these concentrated and enigmatic stories to offer an incisive exposé of the illusion, subterfuge and enigma of everyday interaction.

Focusing on the combative relationships between men and women – between a mismatched couple; an ageing doctor and his hypochondriacal patient; a teenage refugee swept up in the conflict of an oppressively sentimental father and his rebellious son – these spare, Kafkaesque stories are a microcosm for all human cruelty and need.

An admirable collection. Each story has its subtle nuances of narrative and language which establish a quite distinct character…A most impressive work of fiction.
The Times

He has style and he has range…quiet strengths that are continuously and effortlessly displayed. Graham Swift should be read by everyone with an interest in the art of the short story.
Paul Bailey, The Standard

The ties that bind people, the good and bad things they do to each other, the happiness, embarrassment and the pain they cause their friends, their partners, their children – these are Graham Swift’s chief concerns. He has a wide range; he can be delicately sensitive or outrageously funny. He is a born story-teller.
Nina Bawden, Daily Telegraph

Graham Swift has shown that he has an authority – of style, characterisation, grasp of life…These concentrated, enigmatic stories address their subjects with such intelligent conviction and clarity that their ambiguities are not left to be stumbled upon by the reader, but are challengingly displayed. They are like James’s stories in the way they apply an almost scientific analytical cleverness to the things in life which are forever vague, painful or imponderable.
Alan Hollinghurst, Times Literary Supplement

Swift acquires strength from the interleavings and interweavings of his collection. Almost all the stories are versions of the ‘family romance’; protective inventions attempting to cope with the tensions and rifts within families, whether children and parents or, by extension, husbands and wives. Children, teenagers, doctors and patients, a refugee Hungarian boy, a Greek restaurant owner – all are clearly yet subtly presented, in their obsessions and deceptions.
Observer

A masterful collection of stories.
USA Today