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The novel concerns a car journey by a quartet of Londoners to carry out the last request of Jack Dodds: to have his ashes scattered into the sea from Margate pier. Amy herself isn’t attending, for reasons that are explored in flashback as the novel unfolds, alongside the crew’s somewhat ramshackle journey out of London and through Kent, filled with arguments, detours, pubs, and reflections on life, death and relationships. They all seem awed by how things are turning out, and someone remarks how respectful to Jack it is to bring his ashes here.

In addition to the characters who are engaged in the novel’s main action, there are three other narrators: Jack’s widow Amy, Vince’s wife Mandy, and Jack himself. We hope they will enrich your experience of this brilliant and challenging new novel, the winner of Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize.We’re all just raw meat when it comes to it, blown away like ashes on the wind (Swift doesn’t quite go so far as to mix these obvious metaphors, but both are very much present and correct! The author gently reveals such personal details about so many lives, all on a simple trip to Margate. So it comes after the story of the failure of the weekend in Margate—the one, now I think about it, that no number of subsequent visits with Sally as a kind of proxy daughter can put right.

There's 4 main characters ( 5 if U include Jack ) but U have to remember the names of their wives and kids as well. If Vince and Lenny are the most unhappy characters in the novel, why do you think they’ve become this way?He narrates occasional chapters with place-names for titles—Bermondsey, New Cross and so on—suggesting some kind of central role. But in truth it’s not really a style that’s my cup of tea, and in all honesty had I not been able to put an actor’s face to each character it’s doubtful that I would have persevered to the end. Seemingly a storm in a teacup, it was explained (eventually) by Swift as an “homage” to Faulkner, but not before several judging panel members had been worked up into a huff by the press, with one describing the revelations as “embarrassing” for the judges.

The exhausting climb up the hill is another reminder of failing powers for Ray, noticing Lenny struggling—and, more urgently, the need to take a leak….Considered one of Swift's most important novels, the personal histories of Dobbs and his fellow travellers are gradually uncovered in the course of their journey from London to the coast. On the surface a simple tale of an increasingly bizarre day's outing, this Booker-prize winning, internationally acclaimed novel is a resonant and classic exploration of the complexity and courage of ordinary lives.