Skip to main content
Last Orders by Graham Swift

Last Orders

Written by Graham Swift

Winner
The Booker Prize 1996
Published by Picador

Buy the book

Buying books using the ‘Buy the book’ links helps support our charitable work.

Sorrow and resentment mingle with passion and regret in Graham Swift’s Booker Prize-winning novel

Four men once close to Jack Dodds, a London butcher, meet to carry out his peculiar last wish: to have his ashes scattered into the sea at Margate. For reasons best known to herself, Jack’s widow, Amy, declines to join them.

On the surface a simple tale of an increasingly bizarre day out, the novel explores the complexity and courage of ordinary lives. Intensely local but also universal, faithful to the fleeting rhythms and accidental eloquence of everyday speech but also to the timeless truths of life and death, it succeeds in being comic, affectionate and wise, conferring on its stumbling, disappointed characters an enduring decency, dignity and depth.

Last Orders was first published in the UK in 1996 by Picador. It is now published by Simon & Schuster.

Graham Swift

Graham Swift

Graham Swift is the author of 11 novels and three collections of short stories. His books have appeared in over 30 languages
More about Graham Swift

Read more on Last Orders

Other nominated books by Graham Swift

The Light of Day
Graham Swift’s powerful and atmospheric tale of murder, redemption and of the discovery, for better or worse, of the hidden forces inside us
Waterland
Two East Anglian families are linked by a deep secret in Graham Swift’s eloquent and poignant exploration of water, history, desire and tragedy