Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Two weeks before Paul Sheringham was to marry Emma Hobday, he summoned Jane Fairchild to his bedroom. The year was 1924, and Jane was given the early spring afternoon off from her duties as maid to the Nivens family. Instead of visiting her own family, for she had none, Jane bicycled to her lover's home, where they luxuriated in its extraordinary emptiness. But by the end of the day, Paul would be dead, his car wrapped around an oak tree, and Jane's grief would be a mystery to her employers. With oblique references to the surprising ways this peculiar day would influence Jane's long and remarkable career as a writer, Swift (England and Other Stories, 2015) unveils a lifetime of regret and longing, pride and mystique in a perfect gem of a novel. With his unmistakable gift for detailed exactitude and emotional subtlety, Swift lightly touches on weighty issues of loss and abandonment, boldness and survival. The antidote to Downton Abbey's prolonged manor-house soap opera, Swift's succinct rags-to-riches tale of a young woman's unexpected metamorphosis is a rich and nuanced evocation of an innocent yet titillating time. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.
Library Journal Reviews
One lovely day in March, Jane and Paul make love for the last time. Jane, servant in a great house in the waning Downton days of 1924, can no longer see Paul, a young man from the neighboring house about to be married. What happens next is not Jane's piteous unwinding but the story of an orphan who begins life in service and eventually becomes a great writer and mistress of culture. From the Booker Prize winner.
[Page 63]. (c) Copyright 2015 Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.Publishers Weekly Reviews
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 fiancé 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. (Apr.)
[Page ]. Copyright 2016 PWxyz LLC