The Light of Day [Paperback]

“Leave it to one of the great modern story-tellers to pen a mystery where the crime is the least important element…Swift fashions the detective archetype into a workshop for a discussion of human identity.”
—Winnipeg Free Press

“Graham swift is a writer’s writer. He believes deeply in the transformative power of his art, which he plainly relishes. His books are exhilarating and daring, but not daredevil. He likes the bizarre and the improbable. He likes calamity…Swift excels at suspense, and The Light of Day, fated and claustrophobic, reads as if it were written by a British Ross MacDonald…The bleak helplessness of the protagonists is comfortless and disturbing, their love unredemptive and burdensome. This effect is brilliantly drawn.”
—(Ottawa) Citizen’s Weekly

“The Light of Day… possesses a … stark and exacting structure. … [A] classic noir plot. … [C]alls to mind all sorts of correspondingly gritty love stories, from Hammett and Chandler to Double Indemnity, but Swift is more concerned with plumbing the conventions of the form to explore the murky territories of a moral life: the choices and chances one has, the deals we make and the paybacks we take, the responsibility we have to care for one another. … There are moments of understated metaphorical brilliance. … The Light of Day is a tough-guy novel with its heart buried in the twilight. … [M]ysterious and sometimes seductive. …”
—The Hamilton Spectator

“ [Swift] is a wonderfully original writer and his new work lives up to his reputation as one of England’s finest living novelists…an intriguing, even mystifying story of the power of passion, murder and redemption”
—Toronto Sun

“…an intriguing story of the power of passion, murder and redemption.”
—Calgary Sun

“The novel feels both fastidiously and feverishly shaped. George’s path through the day is mapped with such precision that we could trail him…. Though written in short, declarative sentences, there’s a musicality to Swift’s language…. intelligent, hypnotic…”
—The Globe & Mail

“…comparison with The End of the Affair makes the other Graham look hysterical beside Swift's absolute evenness of execution…In this case, though, low key doesn't mean low risk. In its chosen sober manner, The Light of Day offers a master class in narrative.”
—The Guardian (UK)

“The story draws the reader on like the best whodunit — or, whydunnit. Yet it is also a profoundly artful, beautifully weighted, resonant and humane literary novel. The geographical scope of its action may be no wider than the distance from Wimbledon to Chislehurst, but it reaches out towards Croatia, Magenta, Solferino, Sedan. The timescale may be no longer than a day, but it reaches back — and forward — for years.”
—Telegraph (UK)

“In The Light of Day, Booker Prize-winner Graham Swift writes in a style so deceptively simple that its emotional punch takes your breath away.”
—In Style

“It’s a beautifully constructed book, which flows, musically, around its central themes. Ideas circulate and resurface like refrains, the pace is gentle but brilliantly sustained, its association of ideas intricate but achieved with a magically delicate touch. It’s almost short-story like, so concentrated is the form, and, as a novel, deserves to be inhaled, greedily, in a single sitting, all the better to appreciate the complex patterning of its structure.”
—The Independent (UK)

“Swift has the ability to cast a spell over a story, magically illuminating the small details of human interaction and the outside world.”
—Sunday Express (UK)

"A brilliantly constructed novel: rarely has suspense been better sustained."
—The Independent Magazine

"Indisputably one of our finest novelists. This is a book so shot through with pent-up emotion that it practically trembles in your hands."
—Arena

"Swift is a virtuoso of narrative ventriloquism; he inhabits his characters through their voices. Ideas create little rhymes with each other (and) Swift manages this patterning of motifs with exquisite economy."
—New York Times Book Review

"Not only the work of a novelist at the peak of his powers, but also his most engaging work to date."
—HQ Magazine (Australia)

"A vision of the human that is almost religious in its capacity to forgive, building slowly but inexorably towards one final moment of weightlessness, as moving as any other Swift has written."
—The Age (Australia)

Praise for Last Orders:
“Graham Swift is a purely wonderful writer, and Last Orders, full of gravity and affection and stylistic brilliance, proves it precisely.”
—Richard Ford

“An amazing novel . . . A truly virtuoso performance . . . A metaphor of the journey we all take.”
—Ann Beattie

“This is Graham Swift’s finest work to date: beautifully written, gentle, funny, truthful, touching and profound.”
—Salman Rushdie

“A profound, intricately stratified novel full of life, love lost and love enduring.”
—The Globe and Mail

“Resonant, distinct, irresistible . . . both convincing and extraordinarily intimate.”
—Washington Post Book World


From the Hardcover edition.

The Light of Day combines a powerful love story and a narrative of intense suspense into a brilliant and tender novel about what drives people to extremes of emotion. As in his Booker-winning novel Last Orders, Swift transforms ordinary lives through extraordinary storytelling.

This new novel from Graham Swift -- his first since the Booker Prize-winning Last Orders -- is the work of a master storyteller. The Light of Day is a luminous and gripping tale of love, murder and redemption.

George Webb is a divorced ex-policeman turned private investigator, a man whose prospects seemed in ruins not so long ago. Following the course of a single, dazzling day in George’s life, the novel illuminates not only his past but his now all-consuming relationship with a former client.

Intimate and intricate in its evocation of daily existence, The Light of Day achieves a singular intensity and almost unbearable suspense. Tender and humorous in its depiction of life’s surface, Swift explores the depths and extremities of what lies within us and how, for better or worse, it’s never too late to discover what they are.

Excerpt from The Light of Day
Two years ago and a little more. October still, but a day like today, blue and clear and crisp. Rita opened my door and said, “Mrs. Nash.”

I was already on my feet, buttoning my jacket. Most of them have no comparisons to go on -- it’s their first time. It must feel like coming to a doctor. They expected something shabbier, seedier, more shaming. The tidy atmosphere, Rita’s doing, surprises and reassures them. And the vase of flowers.

White chrysanthemums, I recall.

“Mrs. Nash, please have a seat.”

I could be some high-street solicitor. A fountain-pen in my fingers. Doctor, solicitor -- marriage guidance counsellor. You have to be a bit of all three.

The usual look of plucked-up courage, swallowed-back hesitation, of being somewhere they’d rather not be.

“My husband is seeing another woman.”


From the Hardcover edition.