Twelve Post-War Tales

by Graham Swift

An exquisite new collection of stories from the Booker Prize– winning author, about lives shaped and haunted by war

Here are the soldiers and doctors and veterans, wives and lovers and children, who have been affected in ways both subtle and profound by the cataclysms of our times. In “Blushes,” a respiratory disease specialist comes out of retirement to help with COVID patients. In “Passport,” an elderly woman finds herself, in contemplation of her passport, sent back to her three-year-old self, orphaned by World War II. These stories show history in the making, the reverberations across decades of each conflict. Rich with triumph and loss, grief and missed opportunities, moments of grace and contemplatio, Twelve Post-War Tales is a collection of masterpieces in miniature.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Historical Fiction, War

304 pages, Hardcover

First published May 6, 2025

About the author

Graham Colin Swift is a British writer. Born in London, UK, he was educated at Dulwich College, Queens' College, Cambridge, and later the University of York.

Reviews

[MJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Graham Swift is a remarkable writer.

[Jill · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author of Mothering Sunday – an ode to the art of fiction and story-telling – can do no wrong for this reader. When I heard Graham Swift had a new short story collection about ordinary people impacted by historic tragedies, I knew I had to read it pronto!

Several of them are little gems that illuminate the aftermath of war. In the first story, The Next Best Thing, a young private named Joseph Caan, currently residing with the British Army of the Rhine, meets up with a scrupulously polite German functionary who prides himself on his excellent English. He promises to contact Tracing Services to determine what happened to Caan’s Jewish German-born father in World War II. Yet one suspects he is just doing his duty and may actually be coming from a malevolent place.

In “Black”, set in the mid-1940s, the daughter of an abusive father makes a choice to sit next to a Black American airman on a bus in England. She muses, ‘’Her father would kill her? If he would kill her for smoking or, say, for wearing bright red lipstick, then he would kill her, surely for this.” At the same time, she knows that her actions are such an unthinkable extreme of what his daughter should do, she could and would outface him with it.

There is his story Beauty, where Tom Phillips, a recent widower, is also facing the death by suicide of his granddaughter, Clare. As he is being led to Clare’s university room by her attractive dean, Tom suddenly and inexplicably feels desire. Or Fireworks, where the Cuban missile crisis is unfolding in real time, and the father of the bride is determined this frightening event will not ruin his daughter’s wedding. He flashes back to a time when he was a bomb-aimer and he was similarly frightened and yet determined.

Graham Swift is all about reckoning with past selves and finding strengths in current ones, tackling fading memories, psychic scars, and personal conflicts. Not every story works; a couple of them don’t quite make the emotional connection I crave. I am grateful to Knopf for enabling me to be an early reader in exchange for an honest review.

[Paula · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've loved all of Swift 's books; this one isn't worthy of him.

[Sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Graham Swift is a master storyteller. He inhabits the minds of his characters with such profundity that regardless of who they are; a maid in Camden or a septuagenarian in a pub, their existence is embraced with the simple dignity of being alive.

[Marcus Hobson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The phrase ‘Post-War’ is a challenge these days. There continue to be so many wars, that it is hard to find a time peaceful enough to call post-war. Given the span of these stories, it is also hard to place their time line. The commemoration of eighty years since VE Day, Victory in Europe after the Second World War, gives a theme and a launch date for the book, but one of the twelve tales is set during the war and another in recent Covid-times. The characters are always looking back, and somehow these acts of remembering are what provide the link to the title.

These are some of Graham Swift’s finest stories. He won the Booker Prize for Last Orders in 1996, the story of a group of friends who travel to England’s south coast to scatter the ashes of their lost companion, and Swift’s first book Waterland, fourteen years earlier, received a host of first novel awards for its stunning evocation of the flat fenlands of eastern England. More recently Mothering Sunday beautifully captured a passionate affair one Sunday in the 1920’s – events viewed from the central character’s ninety year old perspective. This remembering past events is a common theme these across the twelve tales.

Four of the stories stood out as having a particular quality, a realism that made them rise above the others. The acknowledgements show that three were first published in The New Yorker magazine. Alongside those stories are interviews with Swift talking about his inspiration. In the story Hinges the scene that he first envisaged was one that comes half way through the story – a man and his young daughter standing in the doorway of a terraced house where the front door itself has been removed. The tale begins with a discussion between the now much older daughter and her brother as they prepare to see a minister about their father’s funeral. This is how Swift describes it through Annie’s eyes:

Their meeting with the minister was itself about words, since its main purpose was to tell the minister things about their father so that the minister, in his address at the funeral, could, in turn, say things about him. This, they both felt, was essentially, as Ian put it, a ‘scam’. The minister had never known their father, and they now had to prime this man, whom they themselves didn’t know, so that he could speak about their father as if he’d been a bosom pall. So a better word then ‘minister’, Annie thought, might be ‘imposter’.

In his New Yorker interview, Swift describes his “keen interest in and respect for inarticulacy…stories that don’t get told, the things we just find hard to say.” This has another echo in the tale Passport, where an eighty-year-old woman has to consult her passport to find her true age, but is also forced to remember the death of her mother in a war-time bombing raid. The raid that she survived only to emerge as an orphan. It is a tale told in both the first and third person, like cinema, seeing through the eyes of the character and the zooming out to see the scene from a distance. Memories shifting like ghosts.
Eleven of the stories have single words titles; Blushes, Hinges, Fireworks, Black, Bruises, or Passport. Each one works as a summary of both theme and central motif. A father, sitting outside on bonfire night, recalls the wedding of his 19-year-old daughter threatened by the Cuban missile crisis. Would the world end before the wedding? Fireworks representing the present and the events of 1961. A collection that is clever, subtle and satisfying.

[Monica | readingbythebay · Rating 3 out of 5]

⭐️⭐️⭐️⚡️ 3.5/5.

I mistakenly thought this was going to be nonfiction — oops! It’s actually a short story collection, with each story containing a character reminiscing about a past event. Think Proust’s A REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST but without Proust’s flowery run-on sentences. I would read more by this author, however my biggest point of confusion here is why this title and why this cover? While a few of the stories are obviously about war, some don’t seem to be about war at all — and I continue to think it looks like a nonfiction cover — it threw me off!

[Mark Wooten · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe short stories just aren’t for me?

These twelve stories were all technically fine. Nothing particularly wrong with them. But I don’t think any of them really hit the mark for me.

Each of these stories was from a first person perspective and seemed to be based around small moments that trigger larger thoughts. The story Passport is told from the perspective of an older lady who is looking at her passport which spurs some thoughts on the life she’s lead. Black is about a young British girl in the 1940’s who sits next to a Black American soldier on a bus home which prompts thoughts of friends and family and the future.

I think all the stories are supposed to highlight the human experience, but none of them really made me feel anything other than annoyed. Would not recommend unless you just really dig straightforward, somewhat bland short stories.

[John Newcomb · Rating 4 out of 5]

12 short stories all beautifully presented, each leaving you with something to think about and stay with you, each echoing a nostalgia for a disappearing world. Graham Swift is one of our finest writers.

[Daniel Kukwa · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a perfectly lovely collection of stories, but I feel cheated. Based on the cover and title, I was hoping for stories in the aftermath of WW2, but there are only a few that attempt it, and only the first in any direct manner. Not what I was hoping for, but certainly no waste of time.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

[Liz · Rating 2 out of 5]

A disappointment

[Wiebke (1book1review) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I always feel comfortable when reading Graham Swift. The stories explore moments in the past that somehow shaped a life or stuck in the person's mind. Sometimes it is just something else that sparks a memory.

[Dave Van Rompaye · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a short fiction fan and I really enjoyed Waterland and Last Orders. it's not the standard of Last orders but quite an enjoyable read. Some stories ok, some excellent are the ingredients of a 4* rating...

[Jos Van · Rating 2 out of 5]

Een tegenvaller, vooral omdat ik me altijd verheug op romans van Graham Swift. De eerste verhalen spelen zich echt alleen maar af in het hoofd van mensen, alleen sfeer, geen gebeuren. Ik heb het boek niet uitgelezen.

[Veronica ⭐️ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Average rating 3.8 over the twelve stories
Graham Swift's short stories were diverse in era, location and characters. Most had a reminiscent feel with the narrator looking back on past events in their life.

I enjoyed how Swift infused different moods into each short story - some were melancholy, humorous and tranquil with themes of loss, childhood memories and reminiscence.

All the stories are different in their telling however all have an element of history through memories.

[John Finch · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Passport the concluding story in Graham Swifts collection Twelve Post-War Tales, eighty-two year old Anna-Maria Anderson, a childless pre-school teacher, whose husband left her many years ago and whose parents died during WW2 looks back on her life. “They say we remember everything. Everything. It’s all still there. It’s just that we don’t have the key. The passport.”

This collection of beautifully crafted, accessible stories, each about twenty pages, is full of older people nudged to remember, to relive and to reminisce about their lives. I am 69, roughly the age of most of the protagonists in the stories. I have been retired for two years. I grew up in England, moved to the US in 1981 and now live with my wife in Oxnard, CA. Graham Swift’s stories read like letters from England about people I may have known sent directly to me.

Palace, is about a family’s perspective of the fire that destroyed the Crystal Palace in 1956 in a nondescript part of south London after it had been moved from its original home in Hyde Park. The narrator, like me, had been raised a fan of Crystal Palace Football Club in South Norwood, a few miles from the structure. Dad is a grumpy anti-monarchist who says he can’t remember much about the fire other than it was started by a group of fascists, but Mum remembers it vividly. How can two eye witnesses remember the experience so differently? Mum tells her son that those differences are not that important.

Each story has characters experiencing insights, confusion and clarity about the past. In Blushes a retired doctor goes back to work during Covid. He recalls a home visit from a doctor when he was a child suffering from scarlet fever. His mum described him as blushing. He suspects she might have had an affair with the overly friendly doctor. Now he’s going to a hospital where Covid sufferers, red in the face, are gasping for air. Each story has subtle connections like this, some obvious some not so obvious. Memory and the tricks that memory can play connects each of them.

In Zoo, Lucy, a Filipino nanny, born on the day JFK was assassinated, works for an American diplomat in London. Growing up in Manila she recalls asking her Grandpa Carlos how babies were made. “Jiggy-jiggy” he replies. She uses the same words when she takes Danny, the boy she looks after, to the Zoo as a favor to the boy’s mother, and they observe two monkeys interacting. “Auntie Lucy, is jiggy-jiggy how babies get made?” he asks. When they get home news of the 9/11 attacks is starting to come through. Bookended by reminders of two tragic dates, the story is a reminder of innocence and the extent to which adults go to preserve it in children even when the unimaginable happens.

There are stories about a soldier on leave in 1959 looking for information about his Jewish grandparents, another about a dalliance between two people in York one of whom worked in a chocolate factory, and a melancholy tale about a grandparent visiting the university dormitory room where his granddaughter committed suicide.

Each story immerses the reader in immediate life changing experiences of regret, doubt, sadness and joy evoked by memories. Graham Swift’s Twelve Post-War Tales are gems. They reassure us that we have passports to remember and memories are sustaining and selective.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love short stories. I love their slice of life, the focus on pivotal events, illuminating insights, emotional crises, a representation of life we relate to.

The stories in Twelve Post-War Tales all relate to war and it’s legacy.

A German soldier after WWII helps an American Jewish GI learn the fate of his parent’s family. A retired doctor, grieving the loss of a mother and a wife, returns to work during the Covid pandemic. A man visits his granddaughter’s dorm room after her death.

A family plans a wedding during the Cuban Missile Crisis. A couple visit Cyprus; all they knew about it were a veteran’s comments. A young woman boldly talks to a black American GI on the bus.

It was on Father’s Day that I read Palace, my favorite story in the collection. A man recalls growing up in the neighborhood where the Crystal Palace once stood, memories of going to football games with his father, and the stories his mother told about their meeting. The narrator describes his father’s generation:

He wasn’t an old man that night. But there were lots of still quite young men who seemed to topple readily into being old men. They lingered on the edge of it, as if it were a tempting choice.”

Recalling his father’s rants about things he didn’t understand, how Moseley or Mrs Simpson burned down the Palace, he realized “that my father lived in a world of all-pervasive conspiracy. He couldn’t exist without it.”

I loved Hinges; the children of the deceased don’t know what to tell the minister about their father for the eulogy. My husband overheard someone at a funeral saying the description in the eulogy had nothing in common with the deceased.

Gorgeous, subtle, illuminating.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book.

[Paul Secor · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm drawn to fiction with interesting people. I'm not particularly intrigued by fiction that relates to history, ideas, or politics. unless interesting people are involved. Twelve Post-War Tales is a collection of stories filled with seemingly ordinary people whose thoughts transport them into the realm of unique.

"Black" - A short bus ride and an impulsive action changes the way that a young woman experiences the world.
"Bruises" - A barman points a troubled man in the direction that changes his life.
"Hinges" - Her father's funeral arouses a woman's memories, including an early sexual awakening.
"Beauty" - A grandfather visits the college room where his granddaughter died.
"Kids" - A holiday in Cyprus marks a turning point in the life and marriage of a man, even if he's not yet aware of how much of a turning point it will be

There's not much "action", as such, in these stories, but thoughts and memories are pervasive. And those thoughts and memories were enough for me.

Four and a half stars. I'm going to read another collection of Graham Swift stories soon.

[Carolyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

The word that kept coming to mind as I read these shorts stories was ‘layered’. They are layered historically, layered with memories, layered with references and allusions. There was only one of the collection that disappointed me.

Swift grew up in post second world war England. Initially I thought his ‘post war’ focus might make these stories feel old fashioned. No. He uses the war as a reference point for his themes and his characters’ actions. For example, there is one about a doctor who comes out of retirement to work in a different kind of war - against Covid. There is another story that asks what people remember when… Kennedy was shot, the Twin Towers collapsed and so on. One of my favourites was about a woman remembering her younger self, when she chose to sit next to a black US serviceman on a bus in a Northern England mining town.

Swift writes so well, unassuming prose yet very powerful. He finds an arc to a story to reveal history and how people act within it. How they remember it and how they are shaped by it. It’s an excellent collection.

[Caren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Swfit’s twelve short stories were skilfully written, showcasing their characters’ contemplation of moments in their pasts that cast light on who they were and who they became. Each memory is set against the backdrop of “the harsh sweep of history”: WWII, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy assassination, the Twin Towers disaster, the pandemic and other major events of our modern world.
I appreciated the writing, but wanted more of an emotional response to the story presented. The first story, “The Next Best Thing”, provided the kind of “jolt” that I had hoped for when a Jewish American soldier from WWII desperately searched in Germany for the truth of his family’s Holocaust deaths. “Black” also rated highly for its portrait of a friendly encounter between two passengers aboard an English bus in 1944: a black American Air Force serviceman and a young British woman. Overall, however, I was disappointed that my responses to the other stories were not as strong.

[Rozanna Lilley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this collection of short stories mildly depressing. They all share a kind of flat affect and a tendency for characters to circuitously monologue their uncertainties. A concern with memories, especially the way the past returns to the present with such force amongst older people, is a guiding thematic. Characters frequently face each other across a gulf of misunderstandings and misapprehensions. They are uncertain and, often as not, disappointed by life. A doctor drives through a 'ghost world' in the early hours reliving a childhood birthday party; an elderly man skites about a long ago girl to his male companions in a pub; a grandfather tries to come to terms with his granddaughter's suicide. 'Black' bucks this sense of hopelessness, providing a portrait of a feisty young woman rebelling against both racial prejudice and the brutality of her father. The prose is lucid; the mood of resignation somewhat overwhelming.

[Jeanette Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

There was one story in this collection of short stories that struck a cord with me. It revolves around a woman's funeral preparations for her father, and her grasping at straws hoping to find something solid to reflect on about her dad but not succeeding. In that story, Swift succeeds in executing what I imagine was his intended theme throughout the collection : an in depth, high definition look at the simplest, most human occurrences that we feel like we experience alone, but actually connect us.

There was one story I absolutely hated, and the rest of them were just...okay. I love a refreshing, gutting take on an otherwise unspectacular, every day human experience. It is my favorite type of story. It is usually what I love most about any piece of writing. And I unfortunately found almost all of these stories wildly underwhelming.

I would hazard a guess that maybe I just didn't "get it" but my gut tells me that there just wasn't that much to get.

[The Next · Rating 4 out of 5]

www.thenextgoodbook.com

What’s it about?

This is a collection of twelve short stories that are all connected in some way to the end of World War II.

What did it make me think about?

What beautiful writing!

Should I read it?

Well, this collection grew on me. Graham Swift’s writing is both thoughtful and appealing. However, these stories are more character studies than plot-driven. The longer I read, the more I appreciated all the subtleties. Be aware that these stories are both beautifully written and slow-going.

Quote-

“And at some point in their lives, something else had happened to the world. It had, of course got older, yet it had got younger. It had suddenly got young. Thirty-five had once been the traditional mid-point of life. Not anymore. My God, to be over the hill at thirty-five! At thirty-five you could still be waiting to be grown-up and a parent. You could still feel eighteen. Or five.”

[Hélène Espérou · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magnifiques nouvelles empreintes d’une forme de nostalgie qui n’est jamais triste ou négative mais au contraire tournée vers l’avenir des personnages. Le style souvent elliptique renforce l’aspect pudique de chaque nouvelle. Je n’oublierai pas les dernières vacances sans enfants d’un couple, le souvenir d’une réparation de porte d’une femme enterrant son père, la détermination presque effrontée d’une adolescente s’asseyant à côté d’un homme noir dans un autobus, ni le grand père surpris d’être touché par la beauté d’une femme dans une situation plutôt difficile.

[Marine Roux · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ces douze histoires d’après-guerre ont pour la majorité un lien très ténu avec la Seconde Guerre Mondiale. Amateurs d’Histoire ne vous y trompez donc pas.
A contrario, si vous aimez l’intime et le feutré, la plume de Graham Swift a des chances de vous plaire !
Chaque nouvelle dessine un pan de vie, un moment majeur vécu par nos protagnistes meme si la toile de fond peut sembler anodine.
Quant à moi, la sensibilité et la delicatessuyde l’auteur auraient pu emporter mon adhesion mais son murmure littéraire m’a régulièrement fait piquer du nez….

[Nick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ultimately, a disappointing collection of stories which, whilst individually fine, in and of themselves, lack any kind of thread (the suggestion that they are 12 post war tales seems extremely tenuous). Each sets their credentials out before your eyes, but then without exception seem to fail to deliver any kind of satisfaction. None of them have lingered with me, which I think says everything. A shame, as generally I like Swift.

[Kees IJzerman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Swift is a gifted writer (I loved Mothering Sunday) and these stories absolutely show his talent.

The thing is, these 'slices of life' have all been written in this unemphatic tone of voice, to the point of being detached and sometimes even dull. That makes it hard to get into the stories, so only three stars this time around.

[Roxanne · Rating 2 out of 5]

The premise of a collection of stories with a war setting is a good one and the choices of the wars and situations are imaginative. As is often the case with a collection of stories, the quality varies. Overall, I found his writing too cerebral and yearned for some physical movement, anything to get the characters out of their heads!

[Elyse · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5

I was so bored. Plus, these weren't tied to post-war things as much as I wanted. It felt like just random stories. Sure, some had ties to war, but they weren't deep or meaningful. I'm so disappointed.

[Xena! · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't generally read short stories, finding them to usually be unsatisfying. This proved to be the case as well, so DNF. The first half were portraits of sad or morally ambiguous people, with no resolution.