Waterland -- Graham Swift

Condition : Good, considering age.
Picador, 1984, Medium-format Paperback - Fiction - 310pp. ISBN 0330283952. Signs of repair.
Shortlisted for the Booker, winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize.
Compulsively readable, it is a novel of resonant depth and encyclopaedic richness, mixing human and natural history and exploring the tragic forces that take us both forwards and back. It is also a book about beer, eels, the French Revolution, the end of the world, windmills, will-o-the-wisps, murder, love, education, curiosity andsupremelythe malign and merciful element of water.
As a novelist, Graham Swift delights in the possibilities of the human voice, imagining his way into the minds and hearts of an extraordinary range of characters. Waterland, like the Hardy novels, carries with all else a profound knowledge of a people, a place, and their interweaving. Swift tells his tale with wonderful contemporary verve and verbal felicity. A fine and original work and classic of modern fiction: a vision of England seen through its mysterious, amphibious Fen country; a sinuous meditation on the workings of time; a tale of two families, startling in its twists and turns and universal in its reach.
A quite brilliant novel - Daily Telegraph
Inspired - New York Times.