Another portrait of a complicated parent-child relationship, but a much less happy one. Our narrator here is Daisy, wife of Larry and mother of forty-eight-year-old Adele. Her story is an evolving reminiscence, related over the course of a sleepless night. As it begins, she is remembering being a teenage riding her bicycle down Denmark Hill, not caring that her skirt was blowing up in the wind. Her thoughts then were about her father, gassed in WWI, and that the perceived wisdom that darkness of the past should be left unspoken: the old-fashioned Stiff Upper Lip. But as the story unfolds, Daisy and her life unravel like a jumper snagged on a nail.

It’s impossible to say more without giving spoilers, but this is a story that is driven by accusations and their impact, and which explores that fragility even of a trust that has been built up over decades. It’s also a story about the very human resistance to believing developments that threaten to unseat us or unravel the foundations that we have built our lives on. Daisy’s urge to deny them is entirely believable – as are her anger and her self-doubt. Her life may not have been what she thought, and its patterns are shaken and blurry.

Swift’s final twist is to withhold the truth. While Daisy tosses and turns alone in bed, thinking of her husband in the next room, the reader no more knows who to believe than the narrator (if indeed, we believe her). Yet it leaves us knowing that all our lives are jumpers, and the world has a million potential snagging nails.

Published in England and Other Stories, Simon & Schuster, 2014