Name: They Came Like Swallows
ISBN: 9781860469282

William Maxwell

This novel creates a sensitive portrait of an American family and of the complex woman who is its emotional pillar. Rendering the civilities and constraints of a vanished era, it measures the currents of love and need that run through all our lives.

They Came Like Swallows

Discover William Maxwell’s classic, heart-breaking portrait of an ordinary American family struck by the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic 'A story of such engaging warmth that it would thaw the heart of any critic... Will melt many a reader to tears’ TIME 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. ‘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

Life affirming, soft and deep. A very quiet book, if you’re into that sort of thing (as I sometimes am). 

Gabe Cortez

Will Vunderink

Moray Lyle McIntosh

Trevor Berrett

James and his two sons, Peter and Robert, must adjust to the death of the boys' mother during the influenza epidemic of 1918. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

They Came Like Swallows

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