Four men once close to Jack Dodds, a London butcher, meet to carry out his peculiar last wish: to have his ashes scatterd into the sea. For reasons best konw to herself, Jack's widow, Amy, declines to join them. On the surface the tale of a simple if increasingly bizarre day's outing, Last Orders is Graham Swift's most poignant exploration of the complexity and courage of ordinary lives.
'His finest book to date; emotionally charged and technically superb... Last Orders is about how we live and how we die and our struggle to make abiding connections between the two' - Times Literary Supplement
'Inspired... His finest novel yet' - Guardian
'A triumph... A novel that unflinchingly contemplates human perishability, and that also pays unsentimental tribute to human resilience' - Sunday Times
'Tragic, comic and wonderfullu compassionate' - Daily Mail
'A book to match his masterpiece Waterland... Last Orders confirms his reputation as one of the great contemporary chroniclers of landscape and memory'- Observer
'Beautifully written, gentle, funny, truthful, touching and profound' - Salman Rushdie
