With a title that clearly alludes to a conventional ending for ‘telling stories’ (and hints ironically at perpetual happiness), Graham Swift's fifth novel is a dense, perhaps over-complex book, but one nevertheless central to his œuvre precisely because it attempts to work all his principal concerns simultaneously in one novel. Ever After is also a more overtly ‘literar’ novel than any of the preceding ones, witnessed by the Latin tags scattered throughout, and by the repeated intertextual invocations of Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Swift reverts here to a single, first-person, male narrator: ‘These are, I should warn you’, the novel opens, ‘the words of a dead man’ (EA 1) - well, metaphorically at least. Bill Unwin, in ‘the present’ of the novel - June/July 1988 - is recovering from a suicide attempt three weeks before at the college where he is a don in an ancient, but unnamed, university situated in the Fens, whose motto, pointedly in the Swift universe, is Qui quaerit, invenit (EA 175 - ‘He who seeks, finds out’). Bill is, as we might now have come to expect, telling the story of ('explaining’) how he came to be there and why he swallowed a large number of pills a little while beforehand (in fact, he is writing it down (EA 4), the significance of which for the novel as a whole will become apparent later). The quasi-scholarly work Bill has been engaged on prior to his failed suicide is editing the notebooks of a nineteenth-century ancestor on his mother's side, Matthew Pearce, who lost his faith during the mid-Victorian furore over evolution. Large parts of this journal, together with Bill's contextualization of and commentary on them, are intercut in the text of Bill's ‘stor’ - and hence also in that of the novel (like Prentis senior's memoirs in Shuttlecock). So we do not merely have the chronology of Bill's own life and times to unpack (the novel again cuts backwards and forwards in time), but that of Matthew, too - and the possible relationships there may be between these two ‘his-stories’.

Because the two chronologies are so extensive and their intercutting so complex, I will outline them here in tabular form.