On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a score of 79% based on 91 reviews, with an average rating of 7/10. Schepisi has used his elegant, unassuming visual sense and his instinctive feel for the idiosyncrasies of actors to open up the works of playwrights like David Hare ( Plenty) and John Guare ( Six Degrees of Separation). Graham Swift was born in 1949 and is the author of ten novels, two collections of short stories, including the highly acclaimed England and Other Stories, and of Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry and reflections on his life in writing. Another was the idea that Vince would follow him to be the next ‘and Son,’ a project Vince sabotaged by signing up for the army for five years. Little details from a hundred and more pages back, sometimes right from the beginning of the novel, come together in a single moment that explains whole lifetimes of disappointment and regret.

The central event of the novel is the laying to rest of the remains of Jack Dodds, family butcher, who has left instructions that he wants his ashes scattered off the end of a pier in Margate, a faded resort on England’s southeast coast.It was in her story (or, more aptly, lack of) that I remembered what I’d found most intriguing about Swift’s writing and philosophy. Intensely local but overwhelmingly universal, faithful to the fleeting rhythms and accidental eloquence of everyday speech but also to the timeless truths of life and death, it succeeds in being comic and heartstopping, affectionate and wise, and in conferring on its stumbling, disappointed characters an enduring decency, dignity and depth. The four are: professional horse race gambler Ray Johnson (Bob Hoskins), aka Lucky, who fought beside Jack during World War II and has been his best friend since; former boxer Lenny (David Hemmings), who is always ready to settle an argument with his fists; undertaker Vic (Tom Courtenay) who acts as a buffer of sorts; and Jack's son Vince (Ray Winstone), a dealer of used luxury cars, whose relationship with his father never quite recovered when, as a young boy, he learned his real family perished in a wartime bombing and Jack and Amy took in the orphaned infant and raised him as their own. Nothing could more embody this than the seaside pier – a flimsy-looking structure dedicated to fun and frivolity, deliberately constructed over the crashing waves.

Ray, having been with him in the war, knows a lot about how he had enough about him to have made his own decisions about who he wanted to be… but he became his father’s son anyway. The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. On Metacritic, the film holds a weighted average score of 78 out of 100 based on 31 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". His aggressive banter isn’t just to compensate for his sense of inferiority amongst men who have something to show for their years of work. But my novel can’t just be about a small corner of England or about Margate, because in the 25 years since it was published it has been translated into many languages and people from all over the world have written to me after reading it to say, in their own way, “I’ve been there too.Graham Swift knows how it is often mothers who suspect the motives of men, not fathers and, in this case, Carol seems convinced that Ray has been manipulated. Soon he’s fighting everybody, even Sally one time when they were in the middle of a private little show-and-tell with their pants down. Inevitably, this journey is probably more about the past than the present, and the mixture of these make the dynamics of these interactions more complicated with every chapter. Dust wrapper supplied in archive acetate film protection, this preserves and prolongs the life of the paper, it is not adhered to the book or to the dust wrapper.

Jack’s daughter, June, has been institutionalized from a very early age and he has never visited her; Ray’s daughter lives in Australia and he hasn’t heard from her in years; Lenny’s daughter, Sally, is now a prostitute married to a jailbird; Vince has pimped his daughter to a rich Arab businessman. I can’t remember if we’ve found out yet what the last straw was, but they haven’t been together for years now. A lot of the resentment from Vince came from the fact that he knew he was an orphan whose parents were killed in WWII. An hilarious account of the posthumous journey of a London butcher's mortal remains en route for Margate Pier, and the friends who provided the cortège. The sense of hidden truth – of repressions and cover-ups and gradual revelation – makes the book not only gripping in an understated way, but also emotionally satisfying.

Or, rather, he isn’t going to hide any negative feelings he might have for anybody… which is where his aggressive ‘Big boy’ taunt of Vince comes from. It’s only after the fight, and after he’s scattered a token handful, that we see how deep this goes with Vince. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. And they’ve given my life – I know this from many readers’ letters – something that can be shared meaningfully with the lives of others.