Full of grace and emotional warmth, Maxwell’s moving classic about an ordinary American family whose life is overturned by the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic portrays love, fear, change and grief in a way that is thoroughly timeless. Lucid, intimate and ultimately life-affirming, They Came Like Swallows is ripe for rediscovery.
Discover William Maxwell's classic, heart-breaking portrait of an ordinary American family struck by the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic
Elizabeth Morison is an ordinary woman.
Yet, to eight-year-old Bunny, his mother is the centre of his universe. To Robert, her elder son, she is someone he must protect against the dangers of the outside world. And to her husband, James, she is the foundation on which his family rests and life without her is unimaginable.
As the dark winter of 1918 dawns and the shadow of Spanish flu starts to disturb day-to-day life, a moving portrait of Elizabeth takes shape, set against the lives and fate of the Morison family.
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
ISBN: 9781860469282
Number of pages: 160
Dimensions: 198 x 128 x 13 mm
Weight: 150 g
Language: English
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
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What a wonderful book.
I am grateful to Vintage Books for the opportunity to read “They came like Swallows”. Without their encouragement and the platform of Netgalley I would have been unlikely to come across this...
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They came like Swallows opens on the day before Armistice day, 1918 in a mid western town.
We are given a glimpse into The Morison family’s life at the end of World War 1 and during the Spanish Flu epidemic.
The book...
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This is a quiet, tender story about an ordinary woman, wife, mother, and the gap that her absence leaves in the family. Set in November 1918, it's no surprise when Spanish Flu comes to town... but, then, this... More
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