Here We Are

By Graham Swift

It is Brighton, 1959, and the theatre at the end of the pier is having its best summer season in years. Ronnie, a brilliant young magician, and Evie, his dazzling assistant, are top of the bill, drawing audiences each night. Meanwhile, Jack – Jack Robinson, as in ‘before you can say’ – is everyone’s favourite compère, a born entertainer, holding the whole show together.
 
As the summer progresses, the off-stage drama between the three begins to overshadow their theatrical success, and events unfold which will have lasting consequences for all their futures.
 
Rich, comic, alive and subtly devastating, Here We Are is a masterly piece of literary magicianship which pulls back the curtain on the human condition.

'One to watch for 2020' according to:

The Sunday Times
The Times
The Daily Telegraph
The Guardian
Financial Times
Evening Standard
The Scotsman
The Irish Times

'He tells simple, truthful stories about what feel like real people. Here We Are is a welcome addition to a proud legacy.' The Big Issue

The variety of voices and its historical and emotional reach are so finely entwined, it is as perfect and smooth as an egg. Passages leap out all the time, demanding to be reread, or committed to memory... It is perhaps too simple to say that Swift creates a form of fictional magic, but what he can do with a page is out of the ordinary, far beyond most mortals’ ken.' Rosemary Goring,The Herald

'Here We Are is a subtle portrait of a vanished world, with moving passages about the problems of wartime evacuees returning to impoverished London life after the wonders of the countryside.' The Independent

‘In Here We Are, Swift does not just dwell on the pivotal moments of our lives, but traces their shockwaves both forward and back. Moving seamlessly from pre-war to post, from the events of one illusory, youthful summer to the present, we are given candid access to the innermost reflections of three people who loved and betrayed each other. The end result is the stuff of life, an enduring mystery that Ronnie, Evie, Jack - that we all - must live with. I thought it was wonderful.’ Joseph Knox, author of Sirens

‘As with all his books, it’s the moments of quiet, undramatic poignancy that stay with you’ Sunday Express

‘a quietly, devastating, magical novel’ Telegraph

‘With a wizardry of his own, Swift conjures up an about-to-disappear little world and turns it into something of wider resonance’ Sunday Times

Praise for Mothering Sunday:
'Bathed in light; and even when tragedy strikes, it blazes irresistibly… Swift’s small fiction feels like a masterpiece’ Guardian

 ‘Alive with sensuousness and sensuality … wonderfully accomplished, it is an achievement’ Sunday Times

‘From start to finish Swift’s is a novel of stylish brilliance and quiet narrative verve. The archly modulated, precise prose (a hybrid of Henry Green and Kazuo Ishiguro) is a glory to read. Now 66,

Swift is a writer at the very top of his game’ Evening Standard

‘Mothering Sunday is a powerful, philosophical and exquisitely observed novel about the lives we lead, and the parallel lives – the parallel stories – we can never know … It may just be Swift’s best novel yet’ Observer
 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Release date: Feb 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781471188954

Graham Swift

Graham Swift was born in 1949 and is the author of eleven novels, two collections of short stories, including the highly acclaimed England and Other Stories, and of Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry and reflections on his life in writing. His most recent novel, Mothering Sunday, became an international bestseller and won The Hawthornden Prize for best work of imaginative literature. With Waterland he won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and with Last Orders the Booker Prize. Both novels were made into films. His work has appeared in over thirty languages.

Reviews for Here We Are

[davidroche_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Graham Swift’s latest novel is Here We Are (Virago), set in the late Fifties and early Sixties and in which three end of pier performers find their off-stage lives entwined in complex ways as a result of their evolving circumstances. Swift skilfully moves us backwards and forwards in time while building our emotional connection with the characters. It’s a simple story at its heart but layered with complexity and as much magic as the illusion acts that are portrayed on the stage. Not following the recent trend from his peers of the doorstep, life-story tomes, it’s a slim, perfectly formed novel which belies the amount and quality of its ingredients along with their expert combination and smooth, clever, and easily digested result.

[eyejaybee · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I think that Graham Swift is one of our finest living novelists, up there with William Boyd and Ian McEwan, although I feel that, while he has been nominated for the Booker Prize on several occasions, and even won it with Last Orders, he has never really received the widespread recognition that his writing deserves. I have been a huge fan ever since I read Waterland shortly after its publication back in the mid-1980s, and I think it probably remains his absolute masterpiece. Waterland demonstrated, indeed revolved around, his great capacity to evoke past times, and to blend the present with the past in his narratives. That is true of his latest novel, too, which starts in Brighton in 1959, but both reaches back to the Second World War and moves forward to the near present of 2009.In 1959, Jack Robbins is fairly successful as compere, stand-up comedian and occasional singer in the summer revue at the theatre at the end of Brighton Pier. However, over recent weeks the star billing has gone to Pablo and Eve, a conjuror and his glamorous assistant, who have enthralled the crowds flocking to see the variety show. The three of them, Jack, Eve and Pablo (real name Ronnie) make a strange trio. Jack is a born entertainer, and always has a pretty girl or two in tow, and had been encouraged as a performer by his mother from a very young age. Eve had also been brought up on the fringes of the theatrical world, with early aspirations as a dancer.Ronnie, however, has a more mysterious and serious past. Born into fairly poor circumstances in Bethnal Green, with his seaman father seldom being a significant or lasting presence in his life, he had been sent away from London as an evacuee at the beginning of the Second World War. In this he had been far more fortunate than most children undergoing that traumatic separation from the life they had come to know. Placed with a fairly affluent, childless couple, Ronnie had been more or less adopted, and quickly left his London life behind. More excitingly, he learns that the man whom he is lodged with had been a magician, and Ronnie soon becomes an avid sorcerer’s apprentice, learning (literally) the tricks of the trade.Encountering Jack during their National Service, they quickly become friends. When Jack finds a billet on the summer variety circuit, he enlists Ronnie, whom he advises to get a female assistant as quickly as he can. That brings Evie into the triangle. Swift manages their fraught relationships marvellously, weaving together the stories of their respective pasts and hopes to produce a rich tapestry. Beautifully drawn characters and a simple, but gripping storyline show Swift is still at the top of his game.

[siri51 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A soft gentle story where not a lot happens - magician, Brighton, child evacuee during the war,.

[adrianburke_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Well-written. Swift as ever in the shadows. Reminds me of a short story of his where the magician folds himself into himself until he disappears. So is this the re-working of a short story? Certainly feels like a short story.

[c_why · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Disappointing.

[jphamilton-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Though I’ve been a Graham Swift fan for so long, I was still entirely stunned at how he crafted one of the big reveals in his book, Here We Are. All through the book Swift jumps quickly from the past to the present and back again. It reminded me of a conversation one might have over drinks with an old friend, one you haven’t seen in a long time. They are so excited to be with you and they’re trying to catch up with you on everything so quickly. The surprise was the death of a longtime lover. The book is focused around two events, one that happened nearly fifty years previously, and another from just a year before. The story involves Ronnie, a young boy sent to the countryside during the London bombings of the second world war. His original home life hadn’t been a happy one, and he was quickly enamored of the older couple who welcomed him into their home and life. The man starts to teach the boy to be a magician, his own life’s passion, and the wife definitely had something magical about herself as well. When it’s safe to return to his mother in London, he’s become a different person, and is filled with regrets and sadness about going back. Ronnie goes on to be a professional magician, with his good friend Jack as the master of ceremony, and eventually Evie, who joins the act as his enchanting assistant. Quickly Ronnie is enchanted, Evie and Ronnie become involved and engaged, and are planning to marry soon. When Ronnie’s troubled mother becomes fatally ill, he closes down the show for a couple of nights and catches a train to her hospital room. She dies before he gets to the hospital. It takes him a few days to settle things, and when he returns to Evie and Jack, they have become Evie-and-Jack. They had slept with each other for the first time. When Ronnie returns, as soon as Evie and Ronnie’s eyes meet, she knows that he can tell—he knows what has happened between her and Jack. The show must go on, and after the show, Ronnie goes on one of his usual walkabouts to clear his mind. But this walk isn’t the same, and he is never seen again. Leaping ahead in time, Ronnie is only memories, but Evie and Jack have been together for forty-nine years. When Jack eventually dies, she is left alone. Swift writes so well of that time. “Already a whole year, but it seems, today, like only yesterday. For a whole year now it has been the only constant fact, and not all its stubborn denials—framed photos of Jack everywhere, his jackets, his coats still hanging where he last put them—can make the fact any less of a fact or make it any more bearable.” With an experience I know so well from the years since my wife died, Swift goes on to write the following. “She drifts off to sleep very quickly, but before she does—or perhaps it’s a dream—she puts out an arm and feels the warm familiar weight. So it’s all right, everything is all right, he’s still there.”My words here have spilled many of the beans as to the plot line, but give yourself some time to forget my fumbling words, and then give yourself a true reading pleasure with this fine novel. Graham Swift has crafted another beautiful book that again leaves me in awe of his writing talents.

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Summer, 1959, and three variety performers — the magician Ronnie, his spangled and plumed assistant Evie, and the song-and-dance man Jack — are doing a summer season in Brighton's end of the pier show. Ronnie and Evie are engaged, but we learn already in the opening pages that Evie has subsequently married Jack. A banal enough basis for a story, but Swift makes the most of it, delving into the backgrounds of his three characters from a vantage point fifty years on, to show us how they got to this point. He explores ideas about magic and illusion, about the different identities we put on when we go on stage — and, by implication, the performances we put on in the real world as well. There's a lot of nice backstage atmosphere — at times it almost feels like a postwar take on Priestley's Good Companions — and a lot about the experience of wartime childhood and evacuation, the way some evacuee children found happier homes with the families that took them in than they ever had with their real parents. (I've come across two or three cases like that myself: it certainly did happen.)Enjoyable and well-written, but not exactly challenging, even with the ingeniously postmodern (perhaps even magic-realist?) twist in the ending.