In The Light of Day, Booker Prize-winning author Graham Swift takes readers into the mind of an ex-cop turned private investigator, who mulls over his relationship with a former client jailed for murdering her husband. In classic noir fashion, Webb has fallen for his client and anxiously awaits her release. Moreover, Webb had been called in to track the husband's affair, and Webb's role in the crime remains dubious. Swift's novel is somewhat in the vein of stream-of-consciousness style; Webb's thoughts are described, as they take place throughout a single day, in no particular order and without adhering to any strict plot structure. The novel's strength is indeed its structure: it is based not on chronology but as if on a sort of emotional resonance, with Webb's thoughts and preoccupations providing the novel with a depth not normally found in traditional detective novels. As an example, Swift writes of Webb's recollection of tailing the husband, after he had ended the affair and put his ex-lover on a plane: He headed back towards the car park. In his shoes what would I have done? Found some spot that looked out on the runways? Pressed my nose against cold glass? All those taxiing lights. All those trundling planes, the people inside them like mere possibilities. At night it's hard to follow.... Webb is a fallible gumshoe who doesn't wear his heart on his sleeve, but, thanks to Swift's deft prose, has the range of his emotions revealed as he looks toward the future and contemplates his past actions in The Light of Day. --Michael Ferch

From Publishers Weekly
George Webb, a divorced ex-cop and the narrator of this fine novel, works as a private investigator in London specializing in "matrimonial work": finding evidence of philandering. Some of the tearful women who enter his office become lovers (one, Rita, becomes his heart-of-gold assistant), but Sarah Nash becomes something altogether different. A language teacher and translator, she wants Webb to follow her husband and his lover, Kristina Lazic, a refugee taken in by the Nashes, to the airport "to see if she really goes"-alone-back to Croatia. Sarah knows the truth of the affair already; she's just looking for a sign that her husband can love her again. But the story belongs to Webb, through a masterful interior monologue that links the action of the present with a meditation on the past. Webb's movements on a particular day in November furnish the opportunity to learn about his childhood, his failed marriage, his career as a policeman terminated by a minor scandal and his constrained and lonely life. Sarah becomes Webb's opportunity for a second chance at happiness and redemption. But that reality will have to wait until her release from prison (it's not giving away the plot to note her crime: the murder of her husband). While this story sounds a bit like an American noir thriller from the 1930s (and Swift's title may be a nod to the noir fascination with night and shadow), the Booker Prize-winning author (for Last Orders) is after bigger themes: the weight of history, the role of fate, the inexplicable vagaries of love. Though perhaps not at the level of Last Orders, this beautifully written novel is a worthwhile addition to the Swift canon.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Following up his Booker Prize-winning Last Orders, Swift risks all with his story of a private investigator obsessed with a former client. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
This is an intense, beautifully written novel that recounts one day in the life of George Webb, once a police detective (dismissed for "corrupt practices"), now a private investigator specializing in domestic cases. The novel is about why we do what we do. So, along with the day's events, we hear George's version of how his past has made him who he is. Graeme Malcolm's reading is wonderful. George Webb, the central character, is also the narrator for most of the novel, and Malcolm becomes Webb. His reading makes us believe and almost understand all of Webb's "why did I ..." and "if only I had ..." The story jumps between different periods in Webb's past and his immediate present, yet Malcolm never lets us become lost. In his voice, we always know where we are because we know George. R.E.K. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
As he did in his Booker-winning Last Orders (1996), Swift limits the frame story of his latest novel to a single day but uses that day as a window opening on all that has gone before in his characters' lives and much that may happen in the future. The focus this time is on George Webb, a private investigator and ex-cop whose police career ended in scandal. We watch as Webb first lays flowers on a man's grave and then visits the man's wife in prison. Gradually, we learn the backstory: what happened to the man and his wife, and how she came to be Webb's client. Even as we are putting together these basic facts, Swift is opening the story still further, as Webb reflects on his childhood, his marriage, and his relationship with his daughter--and as he speculates on the lives of his former client and her husband. Although the story takes place entirely within the mind of one character, Swift generates remarkable tension, using the very dailiness of Webb's memories--the smell of coq au vin, the intensity of sunlight on a gravestone--to bring a powerful immediacy to the events of his past and his dreams of the future. Simultaneously, we are struck by both a suffocating inevitability about these characters' lives--"We cross a line, we open a door we never knew was there"--and a liberating sense of possibility, a feeling that, even in the course of a single day, we are capable of remaking ourselves. A remarkable feat of storytelling by one of our most accomplished novelists. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
?Leave it to one of the great modern story-tellers to pen a mystery where the crime is the least important element?Swift fashions the detective archetype into a workshop for a discussion of human identity.? -- Winnipeg Free Press

?Graham swift is a writer?s writer. He believes deeply in the transformative power of his art, which he plainly relishes. His books are exhilarating and daring, but not daredevil. He likes the bizarre and the improbable. He likes calamity?Swift excels at suspense, and The Light of Day, fated and claustrophobic, reads as if it were written by a British Ross MacDonald?The bleak helplessness of the protagonists is comfortless and disturbing, their love unredemptive and burdensome. This effect is brilliantly drawn.? -- (Ottawa) Citizen?s Weekly

?The Light of Day? possesses a ? stark and exacting structure. ? [A] classic noir plot. ? [C]alls to mind all sorts of correspondingly gritty love stories, from Hammett and Chandler to Double Indemnity, but Swift is more concerned with plumbing the conventions of the form to explore the murky territories of a moral life: the choices and chances one has, the deals we make and the paybacks we take, the responsibility we have to care for one another. ? There are moments of understated metaphorical brilliance. ? The Light of Day is a tough-guy novel with its heart buried in the twilight. ? [M]ysterious and sometimes seductive. ?? -- The Hamilton Spectator

? [Swift] is a wonderfully original writer and his new work lives up to his reputation as one of England?s finest living novelists?an intriguing, even mystifying story of the power of passion, murder and redemption? -- Toronto Sun

??an intriguing story of the power of passion, murder and redemption.? -- Calgary Sun

?The novel feels both fastidiously and feverishly shaped. George?s path through the day is mapped with such precision that we could trail him?. Though written in short, declarative sentences, there?s a musicality to Swift?s language?. intelligent, hypnotic?? -- The Globe & Mail

??comparison with The End of the Affair makes the other Graham look hysterical beside Swift's absolute evenness of execution?In this case, though, low key doesn't mean low risk. In its chosen sober manner, The Light of Day offers a master class in narrative.? -- The Guardian (UK)

?The story draws the reader on like the best whodunit -- or, whydunnit. Yet it is also a profoundly artful, beautifully weighted, resonant and humane literary novel. The geographical scope of its action may be no wider than the distance from Wimbledon to Chislehurst, but it reaches out towards Croatia, Magenta, Solferino, Sedan. The timescale may be no longer than a day, but it reaches back -- and forward -- for years.? -- Telegraph (UK)

?In The Light of Day, Booker Prize-winner Graham Swift writes in a style so deceptively simple that its emotional punch takes your breath away.? -- In Style

?It?s a beautifully constructed book, which flows, musically, around its central themes. Ideas circulate and resurface like refrains, the pace is gentle but brilliantly sustained, its association of ideas intricate but achieved with a magically delicate touch. It?s almost short-story like, so concentrated is the form, and, as a novel, deserves to be inhaled, greedily, in a single sitting, all the better to appreciate the complex patterning of its structure.? -- The Independent (UK)

?Swift has the ability to cast a spell over a story, magically illuminating the small details of human interaction and the outside world.? -- Sunday Express (UK)

"A brilliantly constructed novel: rarely has suspense been better sustained." -- The Independent Magazine

"Indisputably one of our finest novelists. This is a book so shot through with pent-up emotion that it practically trembles in your hands." -- Arena

"Swift is a virtuoso of narrative ventriloquism; he inhabits his characters through their voices. Ideas create little rhymes with each other (and) Swift manages this patterning of motifs with exquisite economy." -- New York Times Book Review

"Not only the work of a novelist at the peak of his powers, but also his most engaging work to date." -- HQ Magazine (Australia)

"A vision of the human that is almost religious in its capacity to forgive, building slowly but inexorably towards one final moment of weightlessness, as moving as any other Swift has written." -- The Age (Australia)

Praise for Last Orders:
?Graham Swift is a purely wonderful writer, and Last Orders, full of gravity and affection and stylistic brilliance, proves it precisely.? -- Richard Ford

?An amazing novel . . . A truly virtuoso performance . . . A metaphor of the journey we all take.? -- Ann Beattie

?This is Graham Swift?s finest work to date: beautifully written, gentle, funny, truthful, touching and profound.? -- Salman Rushdie

?A profound, intricately stratified novel full of life, love lost and love enduring.? -- The Globe and Mail

?Resonant, distinct, irresistible . . . both convincing and extraordinarily intimate.? -- Washington Post Book World

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The Light of Day combines a powerful love story and a narrative of intense suspense into a brilliant and tender novel about what drives people to extremes of emotion. As in his Booker-winning novel Last Orders, Swift transforms ordinary lives through extraordinary storytelling.
This new novel from Graham Swift -- his first since the Booker Prize-winning Last Orders -- is the work of a master storyteller. The Light of Day is a luminous and gripping tale of love, murder and redemption.
George Webb is a divorced ex-policeman turned private investigator, a man whose prospects seemed in ruins not so long ago. Following the course of a single, dazzling day in George’s life, the novel illuminates not only his past but his now all-consuming relationship with a former client.
Intimate and intricate in its evocation of daily existence, The Light of Day achieves a singular intensity and almost unbearable suspense. Tender and humorous in its depiction of life’s surface, Swift explores the depths and extremities of what lies within us and how, for better or worse, it’s never too late to discover what they are.
Excerpt from The Light of Day
Two years ago and a little more. October still, but a day like today, blue and clear and crisp. Rita opened my door and said, “Mrs. Nash.”
I was already on my feet, buttoning my jacket. Most of them have no comparisons to go on -- it’s their first time. It must feel like coming to a doctor. They expected something shabbier, seedier, more shaming. The tidy atmosphere, Rita’s doing, surprises and reassures them. And the vase of flowers.
Whitechrysanthemums, I recall.
“Mrs. Nash, please have a seat.”
I could be some high-street solicitor. A fountain-pen in my fingers. Doctor, solicitor -- marriage guidance counsellor. You have to be a bit of all three.
The usual look of plucked-up courage, swallowed-back hesitation, of being somewhere they’d rather not be.
“My husband is seeing another woman.”

Author Biography: Graham Swift was born in 1949 in London. He is the author of six previous novels and a short story collection. His work has been widely translated and has won prizes internationally, including the Booker Prize for Last Orders.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

Following up his Booker Prize-winning Last Orders, Swift risks all with his story of a private investigator obsessed with a former client. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

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