Product Description

From Graham Swift, Booker Prize-winning author of Last Orders, comes a masterful and compassionate novel of rare emotional power and narrative skill.

On a midsummer’s night, Paula lies awake beside her sleeping husband. She and Mike have been married for twenty-five years, a good marriage; they have two teenage children, Nick and Kate, peacefully sleeping in their own nearby rooms. But Paula’s eyes won’t close: the next morning she and Mike have to tell the children something that will redefine all their lives.

Recalling the years before and after her children were born, Paula begins a story that is both a glowing celebration of love possessed and a moving acknowledgement of the fear of loss, of the fragilities, illusions and secrets on which even our most intimate sense of who we are can rest. As day draws nearer, Paula’s intensely personal thoughts seem to touch on all our tomorrows.

Brilliantly distilling half a century into one suspenseful night, as tender in its tone as it is deep in its resonance, Tomorrow is a magical exploration of coupledom, parenthood and individuality, and a unique meditation on the mysteries of happiness and belonging.


It’s a week past your sixteenth birthday. By a fluke that’s become something of an embarrassment and that some people will say wasn’t a fluke at all, you were born in Gemini. I’m not an especially superstitious woman. I married a scientist. But one little thing I’ll do tomorrow–today, I mean, but for a little while still I can keep up the illusion–is cross my fingers.

Everything’s quiet, the house is still. Mike and I have anticipated this moment, we’ve talked about it and rehearsed it in our heads so many times that recently it’s sometimes seemed like a relief: it’s actually come. On the other hand, it’s monstrous, it’s outrageous–and it’s in our power to postpone it. But ‘after their sixteenth birthday’, we said, and let’s be strict about it. Perhaps you may even appreciate our discipline and tact. Let’s be strict, but let’s not be cruel. Give them a week. Let them have their birthday, their last birthday of that old life.

You’re sleeping the deep sleep of teenagers. I just about remember it. I wonder how you’ll sleep tomorrow.
—from Tomorrow

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #307275 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-11
• Released on: 2007-09-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This splendid novel by Booker Prize–winner Smith (for Last Orders) has its roots in the 1960s sexual awakening and takes place over the course of a sleepless night in June 1995. Paula Campbell Hook lies awake beside her sleeping husband, Mike, and worries about the shocking revelation that she and Mike will make to their 16-year-old twins tomorrow. Paula recalls her meeting with Mike at university in 1966, when sex was free and easy (a glut of it), the immediate consummation of their sexual passion, their marriage and successful careers, and the birth of the twins after almost a decade together. Mainly, Swift explores the ways in which secrets are created to ensure happiness, and the potential for emotional damage when the truth is revealed. Swift has channeled the tenderness in Paula's voice with uncanny exactitude, granting her a mother's sentimental observations about pregnancy and raising children. He drops a few clever red herrings, so the narrative retains the vibrato of suspense until the secret is revealed. But the novel's remaining pages, which convey the exaggerated doomsday fears of middle-of-the night wakefulness, seem padded. In essence, this moving exploration of marriage and parenthood is a ringing affirmation of modern life. (Sept.)
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Review
Praise for The Light of Day:

“The story draws the reader on like the best whodunit–or, whydunnit. Yet it is also a profoundly artful, beautifully weighted, resonant and humane literary novel.”
—Telegraph (UK)

“Leave it to one of the great modern storytellers to pen a mystery where the crime is the least important element . . . Swift fashions the detective archetype into a workshop for a discussion of human identity.”
—Winnipeg Free Press

“[Swift] is a wonderfully original writer and his new work lives up to his reputation as one of England’s finest living novelists . . . an intriguing, even mystifying story of the power of passion, murder and redemption.”
—Toronto Sun

Praise for Last Orders:

“Graham Swift is a purely wonderful writer, and Last Orders, full of gravity and affection and stylistic brilliance, proves it precisely.”
—Richard Ford

“Book for book, Swift is surely one of England’s finest living novelists.”
—New York Review of Books

About the Author
Graham Swift was born in 1949 in London, where he lives and works. He is the author of eight acclaimed novels and a short story collection. His many awards include the Booker Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, and the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. Two of his novels, Waterland and Last Orders, have been made into movies and his work has been translated over thirty languages.