'Nostalgia,' sniffs Swift, who hasn't much use for imperialism or historical sentimentalism.

Instead, there's a collection of fairly tame curries, served in ornate Victorian surroundings reminiscent of the Raj. It's especially tasty, he says, when it's smoked, but eel isn't on the menu here at the Bombay Brasserie in South Kensington. Graham Swift likes the taste of eel, the Anguilla anguilla which figures so prominently in his new novel Waterland. And that means he is accessible to everyone.By ALICE DIGILIO ALICE DIGILIO is managing editor of Book World. Indeed, if you had to look for literary relatives, Dickens would spring to mind as much as Faulkner and some of his modern peers. Even the mingling of past and present is done almost unobtrusively. Even Last Orders, with its Faulkner borrowing and its use of different narrative viewpoints, poses no technical demands on the reader. His novels are conventionally plotted and conventionally written. Technically, Swift does not break new ground. For Willy and for many of the characters of Swift’s novels, the past comes back to haunt them. Right at the beginning of The Sweet-Shop Owner, Willy imagines that”he would be history”. The past is clearly important for Swift and his characters and they ignore it at their peril. They do not, to use an Americanism, let it all hang out. His characters, as good Brits, generally do not like to make a fuss. On the surface, everything may seem smooth and normal but, underneath, it is not. The events of his novels – even when they include such novelistic stand-bys as murder, adultery and incest – are treated with decorum, in true British fashion. Swift can be said to be a quintessentially English writer, writing about English subjects and English themes. His success seemed to have dimmed somewhat till the 1996 publication of Last Orders, which won The Booker Prize. He made Granta’s first list of Best British young novelists. He made his reputation with Waterland, a novel set in the fen country around Cambridge. Graham Swift was born in London in 1948, attended Cambridge and then York University.

Graham swift the sweet shop owner