Mothering Sunday

"Graham Swift’s spare, incantatory tale zeroes in on a turning point in the life of a young woman, a foundling and a servant who against all odds becomes a famous author. With no mother to visit on the 1924 Mothering Sunday holiday (when servants were given time off to visit their mothers), Jane Fairchild bikes over for a final tryst with the neighbor’s ne’er-do-well son before his upcoming marriage. Their relationship, although consensual, is grossly imbalanced. The novel, a sort of slow striptease, gradually bares the contours of Jane’s life before and after that fateful day. More than just a story about crossing “impossible barriers” like class and education at a time of seismic change in English society, it is a lovesong to “untethered” possibility and to finding a voice."