FROM THE PUBLISHER

A single, dazzling day in the life of George Webb - ex-policeman turned private investigator - illuminates his checkered past, his now all-consuming relationship with a former client and the catastrophic events which involved them both two years ago.

SYNOPSIS

On the anniversary of a life-shattering event, George Webb, a former policeman turned private detective, revisits the catastrophes of his past and reaffirms the extraordinary direction of his future. Two years before, an assignment to follow a strayed husband and his mistress appeared simple enough, but this routine job left George a transformed man.

Suspenseful, moving, and hailed by critics as a detective story unlike any other, The Light of Day is a gripping tale of murder and redemption, as well as a bold exploration of love and self-discovery. This powerful novel signals yet another groundbreaking achievement from Graham Swift, the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel Last Orders.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

… Graham Swift's new novel, The Light of Day, reads not like a hard-boiled detective tale but like a — well, like a Graham Swift novel. As with so many of his earlier fictions, from Waterland to Last Orders, this story is concerned, at heart, with the relationship between time present and time past, with the secrets kept from family and friends, with the deeply buried emotions lurking beneath the effluvia of daily life. The mood and tone of the book are decidedly Larkinesque: a fog of disappointment and regret wafts over the characters, muffling their actions and suffocating their dreams. — Michiku Kakutani

The Los Angeles Times

Like Swift's last novel, the 1996 Booker Prize-winning Last Orders, this work uses a death to pry loose memory and to chip away at the suppositions and self-delusions through which people view themselves and their lives. Yet it also affirms the shifting nature of human connections, and uses the mundane details of a single day to explore the broad scopes of love and passion, venality and benevolence, obsession and despair. — Scott Martelle

The Washington Post

With The Light of Day, Graham Swift distills emotion and incident into a hypnotic elixir. He is simply one of the most sure-handed, savvy and remarkable writers now at work. He is dedicated to matters of mortality, human weakness and passion, and seldom, if ever, does he indulge in moralizing. Every sentence in this new novel has a certain discretion, even while the narrator reveals everything. The story as a whole makes for a consummately tense read: It has that noir anxiety and makes life at every turn seem precarious. What's more, the prevailing mood is one of uncompromised melancholy, like a Bach composition for cello. Painstaking meditation and deft storytelling, novels of the mind and the senses in equal measure, are what I have come to expect -- and rely on -- from Graham Swift. He is a writer of immense gifts. — Howard Norman

The New Yorker

Swift's heroes tend to be extravagant brooders, circling around the sins of the past as the reader tries to piece together what, exactly, happened in the first place. The private investigator who narrates Swift's latest novel is haunted by an unusual job: two years ago, a beautiful woman hired him not to confirm that her husband was having an affair but to witness its demise. Her husband's lover, a Croatian refugee, was finally returning home, and the wife wanted someone present at their airport parting. All this becomes clear early on. So why is the private investigator now visiting his former client in jail every fortnight? "The Light of Day" is filled with intelligent meditations on everything from the frustrations of talking to the dead to the magical properties of dreaming in prison. Yet the meandering nature of the detective's narration seems coy and artificial, and too often our involvement is interrupted by a flicker of impatience.

Publishers Weekly