Mothering Sunday (Swift)

Book Reviews
Swift describes events long in the past in a way that gives them intense and permanent presentness. The vividly lost quality of the day is conveyed through a series of repeating motifs. The phone call, white orchids in the Sheringhams' hall, Paul's bedsheets. The story has an unmoored, dreamy quality, which captures the way such days become lodged in the recollections of youth…[Swift's] lush, sorrowful prose gives considerable pleasure.
Sophie Gee - New York Times Book Review


[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 - Herald (Scotland)


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 - Guardian (UK)
 

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 - Observer (UK)


Swift has written a book that is not just his most moving and intricate but his most engrossing, too.... At the narrative level, Mothering Sunday has a lot in common with earlier works of historical fiction—Ian McEwan’s pair of novels about a moment that resonates across the decades, Atonement and On Chesil Beach, and David Miller’s Today.
Leo Robson - Financial Times (UK)
 

This is the story of a woman’s becoming, as she discovers her power and possibility. It is a lot to pack into such a slim and tidy volume. But for all the detailed examination of character and the bold sweep of time, there is not a word wasted.... A lesson in poetic brevity.... There is a lulling quality to the movement between sections of the book—rhythms and repetitions, the ebb and flow of a tide, the wearing down of rock to form sand on a beach.... This is a rare read indeed.
Ellah Allfrey - Spectator (UK)
 

A dazzling novel...beautiful.... A vanished world is resurrected with superb immediacy. The shires gentry and their servants move around the pages with solid authenticity.... Wonderfully accomplished...an achievement.
Peter Kemp - Sunday Times (UK)


( Starred review.) [T]his elegiac tale offers a haunting portrait of lives in a world in transition.... [Swift's] depiction of a fragile caste clinging to traditions that define their sense of noblesse oblige...is poignant and moving—as is his intimation of a brilliant personal destiny that rises from the ashes of a tragically bygone social order.
Publishers Weekly


Jane, servant in a great house in the waning Downton days of 1924, can no longer see Paul, a young man from the neighboring house about to be married. What happens next is not Jane's piteous unwinding but the story of an orphan who begins life in service and eventually becomes a great writer and mistress of culture.
Library Journal


( Starred 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.) In England of 1924, a maid who knows her affair with an estate owner's son must end, ...is a marvelous creation who can seem wry, world-weary, innocent, or lusty, bringing to mind Molly Bloom. 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 Reviews