Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2017.
From the jubilant “You shall go to the ball!” of the preface, and the “Once upon a time” opening, this glorious feminist-hued fable tells of a young woman’s transformation from domestic servant to liberated writer. Sunday, 30th March, 1924. It’s Mothering Sunday and, as is customary, book lover Jane Fairchild has been relieved of her housemaid’s duties. But (in true fairy tale fashion), Jane has no mother to visit, and instead jumps at the chance of enjoying an intimate liaison with her lover. Cue much delicious anticipation: “Her heart had soared. Feast your eyes. A story was beginning". By lunchtime, Jane is alone again, but she leaves her lover’s house feeling “a sudden unexpected freedom”. While tragic news is but a blink away, the disrupted chronology of this exquisitely written novel reveals the storyteller’s life that Jane later carves for herself, with only the tale of this momentous Mothering Sunday left untold to her readers.
With such an abundance of life, soul, sensuality and style packed into less than 150 pages, I can’t recommend this flawless, life-affirming nugget enough. ~ Joanne Owen
The Walter Scott Prize Judges said:
‘It is March 30, 1924. Mothering Sunday. The day that servants were allowed to return to their families. Jane Fairchild is a housemaid and orphan with no prospect of a visit home but she has a rendezvous, nevertheless. It is that encounter and its consequences that are described in this short novel by Graham Swift. Jane’s life will never be the same as she begins a journey from servitude to independence. It is a perfect and life-affirming novel.’
| Primary Genre | Modern and Contemporary Fiction |
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Now a major film starring Olivia Coleman, Colin Firth, Odessa Young, Josh O'Connor (The Crown) and Alice Birch (Normal People)
'Exquisite . . . Mothering Sunday shows love, lust and ordinary decency straining against the bars of an unjust English caste system' Kazuo Ishiguro
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
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
'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
Mothering Sunday features in the following genres: Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Historical Fiction, eBooks of the Month, Romance / Relationship Stories, General Fiction, Fiction, Recommendations
Mothering Sunday is available in Paperback, Ebook, Hardback
Mothering Sunday was written by Graham Swift and published by Scribner UK
Mothering Sunday has 160 pages
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