In these beautifully crafted stories, Graham Swift—author of the Booker Prize-winning —presents a vision of a country, England, that is both a crucible of history and a maze of contemporary confusions. Moving from the seventeenth century to the present day, from world-shaking events to domestic dramas and frequently mixing tragedy with comedy, is bound together by an underlying instinct for the story of us all: an evocation of that mysterious thing, a nation, enriched by a clear-eyed compassion for how human individuals find or lose their way in the nationless territory of birth, growing up, sex, ageing and death.