https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/18/here-we-are-review-breathtaking-storytelling-from-graham-swift

The novelist turns the musty tale of a love triangle set in the postwar music hall into something complex and emotionally rich

Some writers are like old friends – you can lose touch with their work and pick up right where you left off. I stopped reading Graham Swift after 2007’s disappointing Tomorrow, but returned to him in 2016, when Mothering Sunday, a slight, sad, poised novel, was published to a host of glowing reviews. I was surprised to find Swift was no longer anything like the writer I remembered. Here was a late-period voice, elegiac and wistful, with prose far from the sophisticated experimentation of Shuttlecock and Waterland, or the sure-footed mastery of the Booker-winning Last Orders and its underrated successor The Light of Day. Here We Are comes (for Swift) hot on the heels of its predecessor, and summons the same atmosphere: this is a novella suffused with quietness, regret and, eventually, consolation.

Short books can be big in the mind, particularly when they contain whole lives within them. Here We Are is the story of a love triangle, although the Jules et Jim in this case are Ronnie “the Great Pablo” Deane, a magician, and his friend, the actor Jack Robbins. Ronnie is initially engaged to his sidekick, former chorus-girl Evie White, but then, almost without the reader noticing it, she is drawn to Jack, and Ronnie fades into the background as Jack’s career takes off.