Swift's sixth novel won the Booker Prize for fiction in 1996, and is, as we shall see, a more subtly ‘literar’ novel than Ever After, whilst it reworks many of his established themes in new ways. The focus is much narrower and tighter in Last Orders, both spatially and temporally, the setting being largely restricted to south-east London and its Kent hinterland, and the action to one day in the present - 2 April 1990 (note the month especially here) - although a past chronology (more compressed than hitherto) is introduced by flashbacks in the minds of the principal characters, and is, not unexpectedly, of central significance to the novel's overall project. This chronological structure is as precise and covert as usual - often requiring careful deductive reading to establish some of its principal dates - and, once again, the novel acts as a kind of historical explanation for the current circumstances of its characters: how the past is the matrix of the present.

Formally more like Out of This World than any other of Swift's fiction to date, Last Orders is composed of multiple short sections, with abrupt headings that indicate either a place (for example, ‘Bermondse’, ‘Gravesend’, ‘Rochester’) or the name of the character mentally ‘narrating’ the section in question. For this time the novel is mainly told - in a brave but convincing piece of ventriloquism on Swift's part - through the south London voices of four men: Ray Johnson, insurance clerk (nicknamed ‘Luck’ for escaping the Second World War unscathed and for his prowess at betting); Lenny ‘Gunner’ Tate, ex-Second World War artilleryman, ex-boxer and fruit-and-veg trader; Vic Tucker, ex-Second World War seaman, now an undertaker; and Vince Dodds, Second World War orphan, now a car salesman. On 2 April 1990 they are being driven by Vince down to Margate on the Kent coast to cast into the sea the ashes of their dead friend, Jack Dodds, also a Second World War veteran and an ex-butcher (like Anna in Out of This World, he narrates one section from ‘the other side’).