Mothering Sunday

***LONGLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE*** From the Booker-winning author of Last Orders and Waterland comes a long-awaitednew novel. ';Mothering Sunday is bathed in light; and even when tragedy strikes, it blazes irresistibly Swift's small fiction feels like a masterpiece' TheGuardian 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 forMothering 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'TheObserver Dazzling . . . a vanished world is resurrected with superb immediacy . . . wonderfully accomplishedSunday Times Stunning . . . It is about the most perfect novel you could wish to readThe Guardian From start to finish Swifts is a novel of stylish brilliance and quiet narrative verve . . . Swift is a writer at the very top of his gameEvening Standard Exquisite . . .Mothering Sundayshows love, lust and ordinary decency straining against the bars of an unjust English caste systemKazuo 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, subversiveHerald Scotland A jewel of a book, a subtle, erotically charged novella suspended between past and futureHermione Lee A work of gold from the subtle pen of the great Graham SwiftLe Monde With this novel he captures what it means to be aliveDer 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