When he agrees, he is guaranteed promotion. Now he gives Prentis the choice of whether Quinn should destroy the files in question. Quinn is approaching retirement and has been grooming Prentis to see if he would make a suitably humane successor. Eventually it emerges that the files concern a friend that his father has betrayed and a blackmailer who claimed to have evidence that his father was not the World War II war-hero he claimed to be. It is in response to his growing alienation from his wife and children to regular visits to his estranged father, who has recently become catatonic and is in hospital and to the confusing situation at work where he suspects his boss, Quinn, of suppressing crucial files in a case he is asked to investigate. Prentis, junior assistant in the 'dead crimes' department of the police archives in London, starts writing a personal memoir almost inadvertently. It won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1983 and was released as a film in 1993. Shuttlecock, described as a psychological thriller, was Graham Swift's second novel, published in 1981 by Allen Lane.
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