Wish You Were Here is the story of Jack Luxton, whose little brother, Tom, has just been killed in the war in Iraq. Jack runs a seaside caravan park with his wife, Ellie. His family have a complicated and sad past, but this news – that the brother he hasn’t seen for years is dead – is catastrophic in unpredictable ways. At the beginning of the novel, when the reader meets Jack, he is in a state of apparent hopelessness: ‘He’d already taken the shotgun from the cabinet downstairs – the keys are in the lock – and brought it up here. It’s lying loaded on the bed behind him, on the white duvet.’ This is the beginning of a journey Jack must undertake. Tom’s death has brought past suffering to the surface. He must recover his little brother’s remains and, in doing so, must revisit his family’s troubling past.

Swift is an ambitious writer. Some novels take the huge,terrifying things that are happening in the world at large right now, and try to understand them emotionally and personally; Wish You Were Here is one such novel. Engaging with the themes of mortality, community and memory, Swift shows how human experiences, such as loss and the need to belong, are both unknowably personal, and inescapably universal.

Swift writes in a way that gives his readers unmediated access to the thoughts of his characters, mixing their inner and outer worlds perfectly. Jack’s voice carries the weight of suffering, but never ceases to be credible. The monologues of Jack, and the other characters, are, at one moment, an utterly dependable, honest vision of the world and, the next moment, totally unreliable. Swift’s prose never loses track of what’s important.

William Heyward is from Readings Carlton.