I can't believe eight years have elapsed between my first Graham Swift and my next. Waterland is better, I think, but Last Orders is a pleasure to read, with authentic voices and characters and the baggage among any group of people who've known each other for forty years.
Reportedly Swift has been criticized for not acknowledging this book's debt to As I Lay Dying. I have to look that up, but, though not derivative, it absolutely has a lot more in common with the Faulkner than merely being the story of several people bringing the remains of another to a final resting place and told from several points of view.