One day in 1959, Pvt. Joseph Caan, a 19-year-old soldier in the British army, visits a German town hall on a fact-finding mission. The official who receives him, Hans Büchner, notes the young man’s nerves and tries to put him at ease with his near-flawless command of English. Pvt. Caan would like to know what happened to his Jewish relatives in Hanover during the war. Büchner informs him that he has come to the wrong department but still offers to help. It prompts him to muse on what kind of closure such people want and expect. What, he asks himself, do “these needy and haunted ones” who keep coming forward really hope for? “To be given back the actual ashes, the actual dust, the actual bones?”

Recommended Stories

• Lights, camera ... tariffs? President tries economic blunt force to keep film production in Hollywood
• Inside Scoop: Trump vs. courts, Golden State rising, and Hollywood bailout
• Resistance media can’t handle the truth

“The Next Best Thing,” the first story in Graham Swift’s third collection, comprises a shrewd reckoning with the past. Herr Büchner (in keeping with fastidiously formal German officialdom, Swift ensures the “Herr” is present and correct throughout) learns that Pvt. Caan’s German-born father fled his native country for England and later died fighting for the British in Tobruk. Herr Büchner then traces parallels: first remembering his own war experience in Tobruk when it was under German siege; later recalling his transfer to England, only not as a refugee but a POW; and lastly revealing that his family were also casualties of the conflict.

As more of Herr Büchner’s life becomes clear, and as he asserts his authority in both the past and the present, the story opens out to become a study of power and fate. “Fate, as in the turning over of a card, or the signing of a document, or a curt dismissal, or the pointing of a gun,” Swift writes before switching to a more ominous tone: “Or — how many had once been doomed or saved? — the mere flicking of a finger.”

While “The Next Best Thing” kick-starts Twelve Post-War Tales, it isn’t representative of the collection. It is the only story that doesn’t have a somewhat bland one-word title. More importantly, it is the only story that deals directly with the repercussions of World War II. The book’s title may suggest that the conflict casts a shadow over the events of each tale, either in terms of physical damage inflicted or emotional cost incurred, but this is seldom the case. Swift’s use of “post-war” simply refers to the historical period the English writer has lived through and been shaped by. His stories play out in the same era and, for the most part, center upon characters who navigate not the fallout from global disasters but the aftermath of personal upheavals. 

In “Beauty,” we meet Tom Phillips, whose world has caved in. His wife, Ruth, died six months previously, and his granddaughter, Clare, has recently killed herself. “Life,” Swift writes, “had become bewilderment.” In an attempt to understand Clare’s senseless and apparently meaningless death, Tom visits her university to see the room where she took an overdose. As the dean, Sarah Gibbs, leads him across the campus, he is afflicted by churning emotions and realizations: He dreads what lies ahead, he is acutely aware that he is now old and giving off a “smell of age and grief,” and, despite his shock and his sadness, he is struck by how beautiful Mrs. Gibbs is and feels, for the first time in months, the reawakening of desire. 

In his novels, Swift has proved to be a master at flitting between different time periods. This is trickier to pull off in the more confined space that constitutes short-form fiction, but in “Beauty” and in other stories here, Swift handles such temporal shifts with aplomb. He begins the tale some 20 years earlier, with Tom learning from his son-in-law that he has a granddaughter and then relaying the happy news to Ruth. When Swift fast forwards to the present, he jolts his reader with his bombshell revelation and Tom’s drastically altered circumstances: He resembles “a man who had seen a ghost. Or was going to see one.”

“Blushes,” which features another haunted man, straddles timelines to even better effect. Dr. Cole, a retired specialist in respiratory disease, returns to work to help during the COVID pandemic. His journeys to hospital each morning are his “corridors for thought. Or, rather, for memories that came thick and unbidden — ghosts themselves.” On one trip, the memories he relives are of his 10th birthday party: the former friends he invited, the illness he caught, and the doctor who treats him — and who appears to have become very familiar with his mother.

Two tales include fleeting flashbacks to World War II. In “Passport,” octogenarian Anna-Maria, once a school teacher, tells her life story to imaginary pupils. She loses her mother during the Blitz and her partner George 40 years later. Now she thinks she is losing her mind. In “Black,” the longest story here, 18-year-old Nora sits next to a black American airman on a bus in 1944, sending ripples (“Ripples? Waves”) around her English mining town. Will her violent father, who often hits her mother, now start taking his wrath out on her?

On two occasions, Swift underwhelms. “Kids” follows Nick and Judy on vacation in Cyprus — their last one of “just-themness” before they start a family. A practical joke on the beach backfires and tempers flare, but not enough to inject requisite tension and drama. Elsewhere, the shortest tale, “Chocolate,” features four old drinking buddies well past their prime (“One day, it might be three. Three … Two … And then?”). It has the same air of evanescence as Swift’s Booker Prize-winning novel Last Orders — a sense of dying days, waning light, and fading memories — but in the end amounts to nothing more substantial than a pub anecdote.

Fortunately, Swift’s other stories are a perfect 10. The few that utilize world events incorporate them not as vivid backdrops but rather distant and insidious background noise. In the standout “Zoo,” a maid working for a U.S. diplomat in London ruminates on the significance of her birth on the same day as the Kennedy assassination. She then takes the young boy in her care to the zoo for a day out — that day being 9/11. In “Fireworks,” Frank Green insists that the Cuban missile crisis will not ruin his daughter’s wedding. The situation reminds him of another time he refused to contemplate looming disaster, “when he was a bomb-aimer, lying on his knotted stomach, above various German cities.”

W.G. SEBALD’S ESSAYS FROM BEYOND

Frank is one of many protagonists who look back and take stock of who they were and what they have become. A number of them flounder in their current environments. A man has physical bruises and emotional scars. A woman preparing her father’s funeral is baffled by the peculiarities and absurdities of her mother tongue. Whether lost and lonely or battling on and muddling through, Swift’s characters invariably captivate, exposing flaws and revealing insights.

“Telling stories, telling tales,” Swift writes in his novel Mothering Sunday, would always be, for his writer heroine, “the task of getting to the quick, the heart, the nub, the pith: the trade of truth-telling.” Swift accomplishes that task with skill throughout this bravura new collection. 

Malcolm Forbes has written for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He lives in Edinburgh.