TWELVE POST-WAR TALES

In his latest collection, Swift probes the complicated lives of Britons young and old living in the long shadow of World War II.

In “Fireworks,” the Cuban Missile Crisis threatens to cancel the wedding of 19-year-old Sophie. People might not show up “if there’s still a situation,” says the father of the groom. To which Sophie’s father answers, “No one’s calling off my daughter’s wedding just because the world’s going to end.” In “Black,” set in England’s East Midlands in 1944, 18-year-old Nora boldly sits next to a handsome Black American airman on a bus and is quickly drawn to him. The friendly encounter, shocking to all aboard, is life-altering in multiple ways for the daughter of a chronic wife-abuser: “This was what she hadn’t foreseen.…That a man can just hit you. Not in that way. Just hit you.” In “The Next Best Thing,” young British private Joseph Caan travels to Germany in 1959 to track the fate of his relatives. He has a creepy encounter with an overly polite functionary who, told that Caan’s Jewish, German-born father was killed in Tobruk as a British soldier, insinuatingly says he was there too—“on the other side, of course.” In “Passport,” an 82-year-old woman living alone in a state of confusion is transported back to when she was 3 and her mother was killed during the London Blitz—a day that left a deep imprint on her but of which she has no memory. “How can we remember that we didn’t have a memory?” she muses. In Swift’s touching, deeply humane stories, life leaves its mark in mysterious and sometimes-humorous ways. His gift for capturing in revealing detail the interior lives of people coping—or failing to cope—with disappointment gives each of these stories a rare depth.

A brilliant, illuminating collection of short fiction, perhaps the author's best.