Last Orders

Last Orders is a novel by the British writer Graham Swift, published in 1996. It won the Booker Prize that year, and it was adapted for the screen in 2001 by the Australian director Fred Schepisi.

The book follows a group of men who have known each other since the Second World War and who live in the same corner of south London. Jack Dodds has died and left instructions to have his ashes scattered in the sea, and his friends set out to make the journey from Bermondsey to Margate in order to do it.

The plot and structure draw on William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. The narrative is divided into short sections told by the main characters, with the progress of the journey marked off along the roads they take, and it moves back and forth in time to work out the relationships between the men, their wives and their children. Swift described the book as a homage to Faulkner rather than an imitation of him. The novel is set in the London of the post-war decades, and its characters are still working out what the war did to them.