England and Other Stories by Graham Swift

This new short story collection has 25 stories imbued with that same deceptive brilliance, pared down vignettes from a literary alchemist who somehow combines several seemingly ordinary ingredients into something that touches profundity.

If there's a common thread through these unassuming but deeply humanist stories, it's a fascination with a particularly English reticence. Often the stories hinge on desires left unarticulated or decisions explained away with clichés: A doctor sees his life in cricketing terms as he flashes back to a seminal game from childhood; a window cleaner likes his fluctuating fortunes in life to the up and down of his window-cleaning work.

Many stories tackle aging with an unusual nuance and sensitivity. For instance Remember This, in which a young husband flushed with a sense of newfound maturity after writing a will with his wife, secretly writes her a love letter. As years pass and their relationship crumbles, it becomes a mocking reminder of his former self. Half a Loaf also sees a man unable to disconnect from his past, as a widower osteopath timidly seeks solace in the company of a younger woman whose back he heals, all the while imagining his wife encouraging him.

The stiff upper-lip demeanour of Swift's countrymen is wryly observed from an outsider's perspective in People, as a Greek-Cypriot barber cuts the hair of an elderly customer who has lived with his parents all his life and feels abandoned when they die. Reflecting on how little he knows his long-time customer even as he consoles him, the barber finds himself still mystified by the English reticence after decades in his adopted country.