They Came Like Swallows

Description

In this tender evocation of family life - an early work by the great American novelist and editor who died in 2000 - the unvoiced currents of love and need that run through all our lives are eloquently measured. To eight-year old Bunny Morison his mother is an angelic comforter in whose absence nothing seems quite real or alive. To his older brother, Robert, his mother is someone he must protect, especially since the deadly influenza epidemic of 1918 is ravaging their small Mid-western town. To James Morison, his wife Elizabeth is the centre of a life that would crumble all too suddenly were she to disappear. Through their eyes, Maxwell paints a portrait of an American family and the woman who is its emotional pillar, deftly rendering the civilities and constraints of a vanished era.

William Maxwell was born on 16th August 1908 in Illinois. He was the author of a distinguished body of work- six novels, three short story collections, an autobiographical memoir and a collection of literary essays and reviews. A New Yorker editor for forty years, he helped to shape the prose and careers of John Updike, John Cheever, John O'Hara and Eudora Welty. His novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow won the American Book Award, and he received the PEN/Malamud Award.

Illness, regret, recovery, loss: it's our times in another key. We watch as ordinary lives take an extraordinary turn - the flu felling some and sparing others, and laying bare their emotional lives as it goes -- Gish Jen Maxwell does something all great novelists do: he conjures depths of pain and regret in words of radiant simplicity -- Anthony Quinn * Observer * As you read They Came Like Swallows, you catch yourself from time to time being astonished at how tightly you're gripping the pages... There isn't a word that has dated. It could have been written yesterday, or tomorrow -- Nicholas Lezard * Guardian * A story of such engaging warmth that it would thaw the heart of any critic... Will melt many a reader to tears * TIME * As the voices of Austen, Turgenev and Tolstoy have survived, so will Maxwell's * The Times *