Doce cuentos de posguerra

After World War II, a new world emerged in which successive generations grew up. It is this postwar period that the title of this volume, which brings together twelve remarkable stories, primarily refers to. But it is not only this postwar era, because each of the protagonists experiences their own personal postwar experiences. In these short stories, crafted with meticulous precision, the characters confront the past, evoking it with emotion or pain. History sometimes intersects with their lives, as it does for the father who refuses to cancel his daughter's wedding even though the Cuban Missile Crisis has erupted and the world is on edge, perhaps on the brink of destruction. Or that Filipina maid who takes a child to the London Zoo on the day two planes crash into the Twin Towers in New York… History also surfaces in the story of a British soldier in 1959 Germany trying to discover the fate of his Jewish German relatives during the Nazi era. He goes to an archive to find out. Talking with the clerk who assists him, they discover that both their fathers fought in the Battle of Tobruk, on opposing sides. It also emerges in the memories of an elderly woman whose father, a young British man, went to Spain to fight fascism and there found the love of his life. They later had a daughter, her, who grew up under the bombs of the Blitz. At other times, the story the characters confront is more intimate and understated, as in the case of the grandfather who visits the scene —an now-empty student room— where his granddaughter has taken her own life… Twelve remarkable stories, in which grand and small narratives, memory and the present, intertwine. Graham Swift demonstrates his mastery of the short story with these moving, subtle pieces, written with the precision and delicacy of a master craftsman of great literature.