Staff Pick
Graham Swift pens a perfect story of class, love, tragedy, and self-discovery. Jane, a servant to the Niven family, has a longstanding affair with the son of another well-to-do family. On Mothering Sunday, when all the staff is off for the day visiting their own mothers, Jane and Paul share what Jane believes will be their last tryst, as Paul is about to marry. What occurs next will be much more difficult to navigate than the end of their affair. A terrific character study of a woman ahead of her time, and outside her prescribed class, Mothering Sunday is a brilliant peek into what it means to be human. Swift's prose is spare but deeply felt, and this book is just simply beautiful. Recommended By Dianah H., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
A luminous, intensely moving tale that begins with a secret lovers’ assignation in the spring of 1924, then unfolds to reveal the whole of a remarkable life.
Twenty-two-year-old Jane Fairchild has worked as a maid at an English country house since she was sixteen. For almost all of those years she has been the clandestine lover to Paul Sheringham, young heir of a neighboring house. The two now meet on an unseasonably warm March day—Mothering Sunday—a day that will change Jane’s life forever.
As the narrative moves back and forth from 1924 to the end of the century, what we know and understand about Jane—about the way she loves, thinks, feels, sees, remembers—expands with every vividly captured moment. Her story is one of profound self-discovery, and through her, Graham Swift has created an emotionally soaring, deeply affecting work of fiction.
Review
"From start to finish Swift’s is a novel of stylish brilliance and quiet narrative verve. The archly modulated, precise prose (a hybrid of Henry Green and Kazuo Ishiguro) is a glory to read....Swift is a writer at the very top of his game." Ian Thomson, Evening Standard
Review
"Sly humor and sensual detail...Jane is a marvelous creation who can seam wry, world-weary, innocent, or lusty. Swift has fun with language, with class conventions, and with narrative expectations in a novel where nothing is as simple or obvious as it seems at first." Kirkus (starred review)
Review
"A perfect gem of a novel. With his unmistakable gift for detailed exactitude and emotional subtlety, Swift lightly touches on weighty issues of loss and abandonment, boldness and survival. The antidote to Downton Abbey’s prolonged manor-house soap opera, Swift’s succinct rags-to-riches tale of a young woman’s unexpected metamorphosis is a rich and nuanced evocation of an innocent yet titillating time." Carol Haggas, Booklist (starred review)
Review
"An almost musical quality, like a Bach prelude and fugue reworking and reinventing themes and ideas . . . both unsettling and deeply affecting. Mothering Sunday is a powerful, philosophical and exquisitely observed novel about the lives we lead, and the parallel lives—the parallel stories—we can never know....It may just be Swift’s best novel yet." Hannah Beckerman, The Observer (London)
Review
"Masterful...[Swift] performs a complex enough conjuring trick, creating a perfect small tragedy with all the spring and tension of a short story, spinning around it a century of consequences with so light a touch that they only brush against the charmed centre....Mothering Sunday is both a dissection of the nature of fiction and a gripping story; a private catastrophe played out in the quiet drawing rooms of the English upper middle-class, the drama that unfolds is all the more potent for its containment....The narrative...accumulates the saturated erotic intensity of a Donne sonnet....Mothering Sunday is bathed in light; and even when tragedy strikes, it blazes irresistibly. . . . Swift’s small fiction feels like a masterpiece." Christobel Kent, The Guardian
Review
"Mothering Sunday is a dazzling read: sexy, stylish, subversive. You finish it and immediately read it again, because, like War and Peace, it’s a marvelous novel of possibilities." Jackie McGlone, The Herald (Scotland)
About the Author
Graham Swift was born in 1949 and is the author of ten novels; two collections of short stories; and Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry and reflections on his life in writing. With Waterland he won The Guardian Fiction Award, and with Last Orders the Booker Prize. Both novels have since been made into films. His work has appeared in more than thirty languages.