"It was true of all days, it was the trite truth of any day, but it was truer today than on any day: there never was a day like this, nor ever would or could there be again."
The day in question is an unseasonably warm Sunday in March 1924. Jane, a maid in an English country house, has been given the day off to celebrate Mothering Sunday as she desires--and her desires lead her into the bed of Paul Sheringham, the son of a nearby upper-class family. This day is not the beginning of their clandestine relationship, but the end of it, for Paul is due to be married.
Mothering Sunday moves back and forth between this day and the rest of Jane's life, painting a picture of her as a maid, a lover, a shopkeeper, a wife, an author and, above all, a woman. Through this lens, Graham Swift (Last Orders) builds a novel that is as much about Jane herself as it is about the power of contemplation and imagination. "All the scenes. To imagine them was only to imagine the possible, even to predict the actual. But it was also to conjure the non-existent."
These imaginings explore the power of stories to help us define not only ourselves, but also our world. Through Jane's memory of Mothering Sunday, Swift brings to life the world that was 1920s England, with its many recently buried sons and a rapidly changing social structure. He builds a world of could-bes and what-ifs, full not of regrets but of a strange kind of hope. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm