 | |
| Author | Graham Swift |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Keenan |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Picador |
Publication date | 2011 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 352 |
| ISBN | 978-0330-53583-0 |
| Preceded by | Making an Elephant: Writing from Within |
| Followed by | England and Other Stories |
Wish You Were Here is a novel by English writer Graham Swift, first published in 2011. [1]
This is a novel about the changing face of rural England. It is narrated by the last of a long line of West Country farmers who now (in 2004) runs a caravan park on the Isle of Wight with his childhood sweetheart, the daughter of a neighbouring farmer. [2] As Jack Luxton travels to collect the body of his brother, repatriated from the war in Iraq, and take it to the family burial plot in North Devon, he relates the history of the Luxton family and their traditional professions of farming and military service. [3] Alongside this he tells the story of the near demise of dairy farming in England, through the twin catastrophes of BSE in 1996 and the foot and mouth disease in 2001. Added to this is the increasingly common and equally disastrous disease of wealthy city dwellers buying second homes in rural areas, thus disrupting traditional village life and making it too expensive for locals to stay in their natural communities. [4]
A family farm is generally understood to be a farm owned and/or operated by a family. It is sometimes considered to be an estate passed down by inheritance.
A tenant farmer is a person who resides on land owned by a landlord. Tenant farming is an agricultural production system in which landowners contribute their land and often a measure of operating capital and management, while tenant farmers contribute their labor along with at times varying amounts of capital and management. Depending on the contract, tenants can make payments to the owner either of a fixed portion of the product, in cash or in a combination. The rights the tenant has over the land, the form, and measures of payment vary across systems. In some systems, the tenant could be evicted at whim ; in others, the landowner and tenant sign a contract for a fixed number of years. In most developed countries today, at least some restrictions are placed on the rights of landlords to evict tenants under normal circumstances.
As I Lay Dying is a 1930 Southern Gothic novel by American author William Faulkner. Faulkner's fifth novel, it is consistently ranked among the best novels of the 20th century. The title is derived from William Marris's 1925 translation of Homer's Odyssey, referring to the similar themes of both works.
Graham Colin Swift FRSL is an English writer. Born in London, England, he was educated at Dulwich College, Queens' College, Cambridge, and later the University of York.
Wendell Erdman Berry is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. Closely identified with rural Kentucky, Berry developed many of his agrarian themes in the early essays of The Gift of Good Land (1981) and The Unsettling of America (1977). His attention to the culture and economy of rural communities is also found in the novels and stories of Port William, such as A Place on Earth (1967), Jayber Crow (2000), and That Distant Land (2004).
Murray John Finlay Luxton was a New Zealand National Party politician, serving as a Member of Parliament from 1987 to 2002. From 2008 to 2015, he was the Chairman of DairyNZ, the organisation that represents all New Zealand dairy farmers. He was co-chair of the Waikato River Authority, a Crown/iwi co-governance organisation established through Treaty of Waitangi settlement legislation to clean up the Waikato River.
Sunset Song is a 1932 novel by Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon. It is considered one of the most important Scottish novels of the 20th century. It is the first part of the trilogy A Scots Quair.
John Finlay Luxton was a dairy farmer and New Zealand Member of Parliament.
Far from the Madding Crowd is a 1967 British epic period drama film directed by John Schlesinger and starring Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Terence Stamp and Peter Finch. The screenplay was by Frederic Raphael adapted from Thomas Hardy's 1874 novel Far from the Madding Crowd. It was Schlesinger's fourth film. It marked a stylistic shift away from his earlier works exploring contemporary urban mores. The cinematography was by Nicolas Roeg and the soundtrack was by Richard Rodney Bennett, who also used traditional folk songs in various scenes throughout the film.
Countryside Live is the sister event of the annual farming and rural showcase, the Great Yorkshire Show. It is held during October, at the Great Yorkshire Showground in the town of Harrogate, England. The public two-day event is designed to act as a shop window for the farming industry. The show has been organised by the Yorkshire Agricultural Society every year since it was first held in 2001.
Farming Today is a radio programme about food, farming, and the countryside broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in the United Kingdom.
Agriculture in the United Kingdom uses 69% of the country's land area, employs 1% of its workforce and contributes 0.5% of its gross value added. The UK currently produces about 54% of its domestic food consumption.
Little House on the Prairie is an autobiographical children's novel by Laura Ingalls Wilder, published in 1935. It was the third novel published in the Little House series, continuing the story of the first, Little House in the Big Woods (1932), but not related to the second. Thus, it is sometimes called the second one in the series, or the second volume of "the Laura Years".
The Light of Day is a 2003 novel by English author Graham Swift, published seven years after his previous novel, the Booker Prize winner Last Orders.
The 1998–1999 Malaysia Nipah virus outbreak was a Nipah virus outbreak occurring from September 1998 to May 1999 in the states of Perak, Negeri Sembilan and Selangor in Malaysia. A total of 265 cases of acute encephalitis with 105 deaths caused by the virus were reported in the three states throughout the outbreak. The Malaysian health authorities at first thought that Japanese encephalitis (JE) was the cause of the infection. This misunderstanding hampered the deployment of effective measures to prevent the spread, before the disease was identified by a local virologist from the Faculty of Medicine, University of Malaya as a newly discovered agent. It was named Nipah virus (NiV). The disease was as deadly as the Ebola virus disease (EVD), but attacked the brain system instead of the blood vessels. University of Malaya's Faculty of Medicine and the University of Malaya Medical Centre played a major role in serving as a major referral centre for the outbreak, treating majority of the Nipah patients and was instrumental in isolating the novel virus and researched on its features.
Will Bonsall is an American author, seed saver and veganic farmer who lives in Maine. He is a regular speaker about seed saving, organic farming and veganic farming.
Here We Are is a novel published in 2020 by English author Graham Swift concerning a magician on Brighton Palace Pier.
Clarkson's Farm is a British television documentary series about Jeremy Clarkson and his farm in the Cotswolds. The series documents Clarkson's attempts at running a 1,000-acre (400 ha) farm near Chipping Norton in West Oxfordshire. Described by Clarkson as "genuine reality television", the series has received positive reviews and has been praised for raising public awareness of the British farming industry on the international stage. The first series premiered on Amazon Prime Video on 11 June 2021.
Farmers' suicides in the United States refers to the instances of American farmers taking their own lives, largely since the 1980s, partly due to their falling into debt, but as a larger mental-health crisis among U.S. agriculture workers. In the Midwest alone, over 1,500 farmers have taken their own lives since the 1980s. It mirrors a crisis happening globally: in Australia, a farmer dies by suicide every four days; in the United Kingdom, one farmer a week takes their own life, in France it is one every two days. More than 270,000 farmers have died by suicide since 1995 in India.
England and Other Stories is a 2014 collection of 25 short stories by the author Graham Swift.