Wish You Were Here by Graham Swift

From the Booker Prize-winning author of Last Orders comes an incredibly moving and accomplished new novel. 

On an autumn day in 2006, on the Isle of Wight, Jack Luxton, former Devon farmer and now the proprietor of a seaside caravan park, receives the news that his soldier brother Tom, not seen for years, has been killed in Iraq. For Jack and his wife Ellie this will have a potentially catastrophic impact. For Jack in particular it means a crucial journey--to receive his brother's remains, but also into his own most secret, troubling memories and into the land of his and Ellie's past. 

Wish You Were Here is both a gripping account of things that touch and test our human core and a resonant novel about a changing England. Rich with a sense of the intimate and the local, it is also, inescapably, about a wider, afflicted world. Moving towards an almost unbearably tense climax, it allows us to feel the stuff of headlines--the return of a dead soldier from a foreign war--as heart-wrenching personal truth.