About the Author

Graham Swift was born in 1949 and is the author of eleven novels,two collections of short stories, including the highly acclaimed England and Other Stories, and of Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry and reflections on his life in writing. His most recent novel, Mothering Sunday, became an international bestseller and won The Hawthornden Prize for best work of imaginative literature. With Waterland he won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and with Last Orders the Booker Prize. Both novels were made into films. His work has appeared in over thirty languages.

Reviews

‘Alive with sensuousness and sensuality…wonderfully accomplished, it is an achievement’
*Sunday 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*

‘Mothering Sunday is, like everything Swift writes, quite unlike anything Swift has written before, and subtly teasing’
*The Times*

‘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…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*

‘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*

‘Love and death and much in between are expertly handled in this short but powerful novella’
*Daily Mail*

‘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*

‘Mothering Sunday is bathed in light; and even when tragedy strikes, it blazes irresistibly… Swift’s small fiction feels like a masterpiece’
*Guardian*

‘Swift has written a book that is not just his most moving and intricate but his most engrossing too’
*Financial Times Weekend*