Description
Last Orders is the story of four men once close to London butcher Jack Dodds, who meet to carry out his last wish: to have his ashes scattered into the sea. The men, whose lives revolve around work, family, the racetrack and their favourite pub, must make their way down to a seaside town to complete the task. Through conversation and memory they trace the paths they have followed by choice and by accident; through the Second World War and its aftermath, through the dramas of family life, and their relationships with each other. In their brilliantly realized, richly nuanced voices, Swift has created a narrative language that perfectly expresses not only the comforts of old habits and friendships, but also the complexity and courage of ordinary lives.
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The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading of Graham Swift's Last Orders . We hope they will enrich your experience of this brilliant and challenging new novel, the winner of Britain's prestigious Booker Prize. The central event of the novel is the laying to rest of the remains of Jack Dodds, family butcher, who has left instructions that he wants his ashes scattered off the end of a pier in Margate, a faded resort on England's southeast coast. Three friends and his adopted son gather in a pub to drive down to Margate to carry out Jack's wishes. As Vic, Lenny, Ray, and Vince make their desultory progress from south London to the sea, the reader gets to know them intimately, and becomes aware of the web of connections between them—animosities, loves, secrets, and lies. In short, the accumulation of detail amounts to a realistic portrait not only of Jack Dodds and his friends, but also of life itself, as experienced by a particular generation and class of Londoners.
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