Reading this collection of stories set (as is blindingly obvious) in England, brought to my mind something another English writer once wrote in another book set in the United Kingdom. In London Fields, Martin Amis said: “And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.”

This came to mind not because Graham Swift’s stories are particularly gloomy, or focus on suicidal folk, but because it reveals a little about why writers choose to turn a microscopic eye on places they know best. It reminds them, every now and again, of why the quotidian matters as much as the monumental.