Shuttlecock

by Graham Swift

Book Overview

Prentis, the narrator of this nightmarish novel, catalogs "dead crimes" for a branch of the London Police Department and suspects that he is going crazy. His files keep vanishing. His boss subjects... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679739335
• ISBN13: 9780679739333
• Release Date: March 1992
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

The one I have been looking for.

For the past 40 years or so I have been looking for what I regard, the perfect book. This is it. I found it on my shelf, of all places. It had been sitting there for years ignored and overlooked for the more preferable reads, the bigger-better authors who garner the biggerst audience. Swift is magic. His main character, Prentis, is as I would draw him, ignomatic, real, diabolical. The book has a lurid, eeire feel to it, not creepy, but weird, the way I like it. Easy to follow but not shallow by any means. Anyone who becomes bored by reading Swift is a moron. There is a pile of substance between those simple lines, it just takes a littel intellect to find it.

A magnificent book. Grippin, enthralling & completely unique

Following Graham Swift's well-deserved successes with Waterland & Last Orders, I'm amazed this book remains virtually unknown. It is one of my all-time favourites, repaying multiple readings.It works on several levels - as a straight thriller (is the narrator really paranoid? is Quinn insane? what's the truth about Prentice Snr, a mute inmate in a mental hospital), as a wonderfully vivid decriptive novel (Wimbledon, the London underground & Eastern France are all brought to life magnificently), a terrific gallery of characters, a study on family relations, guilt and expectations ... I could go on.My advice: buy it, read it & pass it on to your friends.