Every One Still Here is the debut short story collection of an Irish writer called Liadan Ni Chuinn. I became aware of it while reading an interview with the novelist, Ali Smith, who recommended it highly. Smith is a brilliant writer, but our tastes in fiction are clearly very different because I finished the collection of six stories feeling disappointed by it and puzzled by her recommendation. There was something relentlessly grim about the stories and a uniformity of tone and emotional color in the collection as a whole that left me feeling disengaged. What can I say? Smith must have seen something I missed.

Graham Swift has for me been the most consistently satisfying storyteller from that generation of British writers that began to publish in the early 1980s. Some of his peers have been more prolific (Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie), and others have won greater acclaim (Kazuo Ishiguro and Julian Barnes), but Swift is the one whose books I look forward to most and have been the most dependably rewarding.

Twelve Post-War Tales is, I think, only his third collection of short stories in a writing career that began in 1980. Many of the stories feature, directly or indirectly, a moment or incident of great crisis for the world. A retired doctor volunteers his time to help out at his local hospital during the COVID pandemic. The attacks of September 11th upend the plans of a family due to return to America after a diplomatic posting to London comes to an end. Pearl Harbor, the assassination of JFK, the burning of Crystal Palace, and the Blitz; incidents of global or national importance become the lens through which a small, individual life is examined for signs of impact and trauma.

The writing here is masterful, as anyone who knows Swift would expect, and there’s something arresting and truthful in every story. Having said that, it’s an uneven collection, and one or two of the tales miss the intended marks. A small quibble. This is a wonderful book by a master of the short story art.