Sweet Shop Owner

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF LAST ORDERS AND MOTHERING SUNDAY, reissued for the first time in Scribner For forty years, Willy Chapman has struck a strange but steadfast bargain between the two poles of his life: his beautiful but emotionally damaged wife and the sweet shop he runs on a south London high street. Devoted to each, he has maintained a delicate, precarious balance. Now, on a hot summer's day, he attempts to settle his final accounts and reach an understanding with a third, disruptive element in his reckoning: his angry, unforgiving daughter. Spanning five decades and intricately exploring a doomed family triangle, Graham Swift's first novel already shows the historical scope combined with intense intimacy that will characterise his work. `A marvellous first novel' New Statesman `Brilliantly chronicled' The Spectator