Shuttlecock
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Edition: 1st uk ed.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Condition remarks: Light foxing on book block.
What does it mean to live in the shadow of a hero — particularly when that hero is your own father, and his silence may be hiding something unforgivable? Shuttlecock is Graham Swift's gripping psychological novel set in contemporary London, chronicling the quiet unravelling of Prentis, a clerk in a police department's dead crimes division, as he becomes obsessed with his father's wartime memoir and the dark secret buried within it. Haunted by his father's catatonic silence in a psychiatric hospital and tormented by his domineering boss Quinn, Prentis finds himself caught between admiration and suspicion, loyalty and betrayal — tossed back and forth, like a shuttlecock, between forces beyond his control. Swift constructs a masterful study of power, guilt, and inherited identity, weaving together the personal and the historical with the precision and quiet menace that would come to define his celebrated career. The novel sits firmly in the tradition of British psychological fiction, drawing comparisons to the work of Patrick McGrath and early Ian McEwan in its cool, unsettling dissection of masculine anxiety and the unreliable narrator. First published in 1981, Shuttlecock remains a testament to Swift's extraordinary ability to make the domestic feel deeply sinister — and raises a question that lingers long after the final page: can the truth ever truly set us free, or does it simply bind us in new chains?
Author: Graham Swift
Format: Hardback
Published: 1981, Allen Lane
Genre: Modern fiction
Edition: 1st uk ed.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Condition remarks: Light foxing on book block.
What does it mean to live in the shadow of a hero — particularly when that hero is your own father, and his silence may be hiding something unforgivable? Shuttlecock is Graham Swift's gripping psychological novel set in contemporary London, chronicling the quiet unravelling of Prentis, a clerk in a police department's dead crimes division, as he becomes obsessed with his father's wartime memoir and the dark secret buried within it. Haunted by his father's catatonic silence in a psychiatric hospital and tormented by his domineering boss Quinn, Prentis finds himself caught between admiration and suspicion, loyalty and betrayal — tossed back and forth, like a shuttlecock, between forces beyond his control. Swift constructs a masterful study of power, guilt, and inherited identity, weaving together the personal and the historical with the precision and quiet menace that would come to define his celebrated career. The novel sits firmly in the tradition of British psychological fiction, drawing comparisons to the work of Patrick McGrath and early Ian McEwan in its cool, unsettling dissection of masculine anxiety and the unreliable narrator. First published in 1981, Shuttlecock remains a testament to Swift's extraordinary ability to make the domestic feel deeply sinister — and raises a question that lingers long after the final page: can the truth ever truly set us free, or does it simply bind us in new chains?