In the sweet shop Willy Chapman was free, absolved from all responsibility, and he ran his sweet shop like his life - quietly, steadfastly, devotedly. It was a bargain struck between Chapman and his beautiful, emotionally injured wife - a bargain based on unexpressed, inexpressible love and on a courageous acceptance of life's deprivation . threatened only by Dorry, their clever, angry, unforgiving daughter. The sweet shop owner in Graham Swift's excellent first novel is .a man with a laugh inside him, who was never allowed to give or take love, but in whom the laugh did not die.Moving evocatively but purposefully through four decades, this beautifully balanced novel describes the arrangements, accommodations, pacts and treaties of our ordinary lives: what makes them uneventfully profound. The Times A remarkable novel.There is a touch of Joyce in Graham Swift's revelation of the hidden poetry of small men's lives.

New York Times A marvellous first novel. New Statesman The themes are already the themes of a mature novelist - the choices (and lack of choice) that determine the shape of men's working lives, the way people struggle to make sense of their personal stories, the criss-crossing of private and public history.a quiet but beautifully shaped book. Maggie Gee, Literary Review In his moving first novel, THE SWEET SHOP OWNER, Graham Swift illuminates the history of one man through flashbacks on the last day of that man's life. Through the succinctly evoked provincial decades one of the engrossing features is the difficulty of love and communication between generations. Alan Hollinghurst, London Review of Books An impressive first novel.brilliantly chronicled. Spectator.