Wish You Were Here - Graham Swift

On an autumn day in 2006, on the Isle of Wight, Jack Luxton, former Devon farmer and now the proprietor of a seaside caravan park, receives the news that his soldier brother Tom, not seen for years, has been killed in Iraq.

For Jack and his wife Ellie this will have a potentially catastrophic impact. For Jack in particular it means a crucial journey-to receive his brother's remains, but also into his own most secret, troubling memories and into the land of his and Ellie's past.

Wish You Were Here is both a gripping account of things that touch and test our human core and a resonant novel about a changing England. Rich with a sense of the intimate and the local, it is also, inescapably, about a wider, afflicted world. Moving towards an almost unbearably tense climax, it allows us to feel the stuff of headlines-the return of a dead soldier from a foreign war-as heart-wrenching personal truth.

'This is a profound and powerful portrait of a nation and a man in crisis, that for all its gentle intensity also manages to be an unputdownable read.' Scotland on Sunday

'The novel expertly explores the poignant contrast between irrepressible human hope and the constraints within which we live our finite lives.' The Times

'Affecting, powerfully sober prose . . . Wish You Were Here is a work of wide, ambitious span' Sunday Times