Graham Swift's long-awaited most recent novel (published in February 2003 - seven years after Last Orders) seems to be, almost unnervingly, pure Swift: as though he has been rendering his work down to a reduced and clarified essence. When it first appeared, one reviewer noted that the geographi- cal area the novel covers had shrunk to a specific part of south London (Wimbledon/Putney Vale) and Chislehurst in Kent, but it is also much reduced in chronological scope, with the end of the Second World War just creeping in but most of the principal events taking place in the late 1980s and 1990s and with ‘the present’ once more comprising a single day, 20 November 1997. Even so, the relationship between the events, and the ‘explanation’ for why they occur, is subject to what we might now call Swift's ‘slow-release’ mode of narration, with small fragments of ‘what really happened’ being offered the reader in an unhurried, non-linear and apparently piecemeal fashion. Furthermore, Swift has returned to a single male narrator; introduces no other characters than ones who are largely absent for some reason (dead, in prison, have walked out); and has further honed his style in order, as he put it in an interview, to ‘make ordinary simple words do extraordinary things’ - of which the following is a brief example: ‘Late October. The clocks about to go back. Now more things could happen in the dark’ (LD 29). But what is even more striking is that some of these ‘ordinary simple words’ are again the ones that have tolled so regularly throughout his previous fiction: ‘tell/not tell’, ‘know/not know’, ‘real/unreal’, ‘secrets’, ‘love’, ‘stories’, ‘whole stories’, ‘writing’. And either because we are over-attuned to Swift's writing by now or because of the pared-down style, they seem to be even more inescapably present than hitherto. So is Swift just working the same old vein, albeit with even greater writerly finesse (a little bit of ivory two inches wide?), or is he developing his themes, even taking a different focus?

20 November 1997 - ‘toda's a special da’ (LD 3) - is the second anniversary of the stabbing to death of her husband, Bob, a successful gynaecologist, by Sarah Nash, a college lecturer, who for the past two years has been serving a life sentence in a women's prison as a result.