Graham Swift

In England three working-class buddies, united by pub-drinking and World War II experiences, drive the ashes of the fourth to the sea. In the process emerge the lives of four families and the reason no wife came. By the author of Ever after.

On a midsummer's night, Paula Hook lies awake, her family sleeping nearby. Contemplating a secret she will reveal to her children the next day, she begins a story that is both a celebration of love and a moving acknowledgment of the fragilities, illusions, and secrets on which even our most intimate sense of self can rest.

"It's the summer of 1959, and something magical can be witnessed at the end of the pier in beach town Brighton, England. Jack Robbins, Ronnie Deane, and Evie White are performing in a seaside variety show, starring as Jack Robinson the compere comedian, and The Great Pablo and Eve: a magic act. By the end of the summer, Evie's glinting engagement ring will be flung to the bottom of the ocean and one of the trifecta will vanish forever. All three friends...

"From the Booker Award winner: a luminous, profoundly moving work of fiction that begins with an afternoon tryst in 1924 between a servant girl and the young man of the neighboring house, but then opens to reveal the whole life of a remarkable woman. Twenty-two-year-old Jane Fairchild, orphaned at birth, has worked as a maid at one English country estate since she was sixteen. And for almost all of those years she has been the secret lover to Paul...

"Follows the jouney of self-discovery of Jane Fairchild, from 1924, when she works as a maid and has an affair with a wealthy neighbor who is going to marry a woman in his social circle, to the end of the century, when she is an old woman and successful writer."--

A maid living in post-World War I England secretly plans to meet with the man she loves before he leaves to marry another woman.