Mothering Sunday: a romance - Tapa dura

`Swift has written a book that is not just his most moving and intricate but his most engrossing too' * Financial Times Weekend * `Mothering Sunday is bathed in light; and even when tragedy strikes, it blazes irresistibly... Swift's small fiction feels like a masterpiece' * Guardian * `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' * Observer * `Love and death and much in between are expertly handled in this short but powerful novella' * Daily Mail * `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' * Spectator * `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' * Independent * `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' * Mail on Sunday * `Mothering Sunday is, like everything Swift writes, quite unlike anything Swift has written before, and subtly teasing' * The Times * `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' * Evening Standard * `Alive with sensuousness and sensuality...wonderfully accomplished, it is an achievement' * Sunday Times *

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.