“Trying to Make Amends”: Forms of Forgiveness and Implied Values in Graham Swift’s Last Orders and Charlotte Wood’s The Weekend.

This article analyzes the theme of forgiveness and its implied cultural values in Graham Swift’s *Last Orders* (1996) and Charlotte Wood’s *The Weekend* (2019), two novels centered on groups of friends coming to terms with the death of a mutual acquaintance. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s idea that a protagonist’s death prompts readers to rethink their own lives, the study uses forgiveness as a lens to explore each novel’s implied worldview, understood as the text’s culturally conditioned model of the world. *Last Orders*, set in an upper-lower class English milieu, conceptualizes forgiveness as self-forgiveness tied to autonomy and breaking free from social and familial constraints, while *The Weekend*, featuring middle-class Australian women, frames forgiveness as disillusionment leading to reconciliation through confronting painful truths. Both novels share motifs such as friendship, generational conflict, and the symbolic presence of the sea as hope, but differ in their socio-cultural contexts and ethical emphases, with *The Weekend* offering a more affirmative resolution grounded in community and truth.