Last Orders — Graham Swift

Four men -- friends, most of them, for half a lifetime -- gather in a London pub. They have taken it upon themselves to carry out the last orders of Jack Dodds, master butcher, and deliver his ashes to the sea. As they drive towards the fulfillment of their mission, their errand becomes an extraordinary journey into their collective and individual pasts.

Braiding these men's voices -- and that of Jack's mysteriously absent widow -- into a choir of secret sorrow and resentment, passion and regret, Graham Swift creates a testament to a changing England and to enduring mortality. Honest, moving, yet richly comic, faithful both to the passing rhythms of daily speech and to the abiding truths of life and death, Last Orders is a triumph.