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Mothering Sunday

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Mothering Sunday

By: Graham Swift
Narrated by: Alex Jennings
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***LONGLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE***
From the Booker-winning author of Last Orders and Waterland comes a long-awaited new novel. ‘Mothering Sunday is bathed in light; and even when tragedy strikes, it blazes irresistibly… Swift’s small fiction feels like a masterpiece’ The Guardian

It is March 30th 1924. It is Mothering Sunday.

How will Jane Fairchild, orphan and housemaid, occupy her time when she has no mother to visit? How, shaped by the events of this never to be forgotten day, will her future unfold?

Beginning with an intimate assignation and opening to embrace decades, Mothering Sunday has at its heart both the story of a life and the life that stories can magically contain. Constantly surprising, joyously sensual and deeply moving, it is Graham Swift at his thrilling best.

Praise for Mothering Sunday:

‘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’ The Observer

'Dazzling . . . a vanished world is resurrected with superb immediacy . . . wonderfully accomplished' Sunday Times

'Stunning . . . It is about the most perfect novel you could wish to read' The Guardian

'From start to finish Swift's is a novel of stylish brilliance and quiet narrative verve . . . Swift is a writer at the very top of his game' Evening Standard

'Exquisite . . . Mothering Sunday shows love, lust and ordinary decency straining against the bars of an unjust English caste system' Kazuo Ishiguro

‘Mastery and resonance . . . It’s one of the novel’s great strengths to be able to shift with such agility between focus scene and lifetime recollection . . . the languid, blissful minutes of March 30, 1924 seem to contain all the succeeding decades’ Times Literary Supplement

'A dazzling read: sexy, stylish, subversive' Herald Scotland

'A jewel of a book, a subtle, erotically charged novella suspended between past and future' Hermione Lee

'A work of gold from the subtle pen of the great Graham Swift' Le Monde

'With this novel he captures what it means to be alive' Der Spiegel

‘An exquisite novella of love and loss . . . a short yet powerful and intricately layered work . . . every sentence counting and not a word out of place’ The Australian Literary Fiction Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Heartfelt

Critic reviews

‘Alive with sensuousness and sensuality…wonderfully accomplished, it is an achievement’
‘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. Now 66, Swift is a writer at the very top of his game’
‘Mothering Sunday is, like everything Swift writes, quite unlike anything Swift has written before, and subtly teasing’
‘Swift’s novella is a telling snapshot of a society struggling with the death toll of World War I, and cleverly pinpoints the fractures in the class system’
‘Mothering Sunday is…a Conradian homage to a well-spring of inspiration…you can heard his master’s voice echoing through the pages of this deceptively fine novel’
‘With a clear focus on the possibilities of the short form, Graham Swift achieves a delicate harmony between the cool detachment of the narrative voice and the intensity of emotion conveyed on every page. This is a rare read indeed’
‘Love and death and much in between are expertly handled in this short but powerful novella’
‘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: “All the scenes. All the scenes that never occur, but wait in the wings of possibility.” It may just be Swift’s best novel yet’
‘Mothering Sunday is bathed in light; and even when tragedy strikes, it blazes irresistibly… Swift’s small fiction feels like a masterpiece’
‘Swift has written a book that is not just his most moving and intricate but his most engrossing too’
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