Mothering Sunday
A Romance
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3.9 • 59 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From the Booker Prize-winning author, an 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. • Don’t miss the major motion picture starring Odessa Young, Josh O’Connor, Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù, Colin Firth, and more
“Exquisite ... shows love, lust, and ordinary decency struggling against the bars of an unjust English caste system.” —Kazuo Ishiguro, The Guardian
On an unseasonably warm spring day in the 1920s, twenty-two-year-old Jane Fairchild, a maid at an English country house, meets with her secret lover, the young heir of a neighboring estate. He is about to be married to a woman more befitting his social status, and the time has come to end the affair—but events unfold in ways Jane could never have predicted.
As the narrative moves back and forth across the twentieth century, what we know and understand about Jane—about the way she loves, thinks, feels, sees, and remembers—expands with every page. In Mothering Sunday, Swift has crafted an emotionally soaring and profoundly moving work of fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in 1924, in an England still reeling from the loss of young men to the Great War, this elegiac tale offers a haunting portrait of lives in a world in transition. Its events unfold from the viewpoint of Jane Fairchild, a 22-year-old maid at the Berkshire estate Beechwood. On the titular day a Sunday before Easter that the aristocracy traditionally give their help off to visit their families Jane bikes to neighboring Upleigh for a final fling with Paul Sheringham, her wealthy lover for the past five years, who is soon to marry into another blue blood family. No one can anticipate that the day will end abruptly with a devastating tragedy and, for Jane, an epiphany that marks the start of a future as rich and rewarding as it is unforeseen. The story lingers on the immediate aftermath of Jane and Paul's tryst and Swift (England and Other Stories) invests its every detail the order in which Paul hastily dons formal attire to lunch with his fianc and their families, the casualness with which Jane explores his estate home in the nude with gravity and symbolic weight. His depiction of a fragile caste clinging to traditions that define their sense of noblesse oblige while struggling to bear the era's crushing burden of "accumulated loss and grief" is poignant and moving as is his intimation of a brilliant personal destiny that rises from the ashes of a tragically bygone social order.
