In noughties Britain, where authors gain media notice by spouting headline-grabbing opinions and flaunting their eccentric lifestyles, Graham Swift is an unusual figure.
His media persona is unpretentious and his opinions demure. An A-list writer with a low profile, his personal history is as seemingly unremarkable as the characters in his work.
Across his eight novels - most notably his 1983 saga, Waterland, set in the low-lying, marshy terrain of the British fens, and his 1996 Booker Prize-winning novel Last Orders - Swift has emerged as Britain's chief practitioner of artful banality. His work is free of the flamboyant
plots and linguistic pyrotechnics of contemporaries such as Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Julian Barnes.
Swift's new novel, Tomorrow, stemmed from a desire to write about happiness. It's a simple idea, but a challenge that few novelists would take on. As Leo Tolstoy opened Anna Karenina: 'All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Because drama hinges on conflict, domestic bliss is inherently undramatic. 'There's no real story in happiness,' says the 58-year-old Swift.
So he wrote about a close-knit family whose serenity is jeopardised. 'The way to write about happiness and make it nonetheless dramatic is to write about it at a point where it's vulnerable,' he says.
Tomorrow opens at 1am as Paula, a successful art dealer and mother of 16-year-old twins, lies awake, anxiously anticipating the day ahead. After sunrise, Paula and her husband, Mike, the prosperous boss of a science publishing company, will tell their children the truth about their origins.