"Mothering Sunday" by Graham Swift (re-read)

The June book for my Gateway/Lighthouse Women Nomo book club -- which I suggested (!) -- is "Mothering Sunday" by Graham Swift, which I read a little over a year ago. (My original review is here.)  

This is a short book -- about 200 pages -- and, title aside, there are very few triggers from a childless/ALI perspective.   

It's Mothering Sunday -- a beautiful day in late March 1924 in the English countryside, when servants all over the country were given the day off to return home to visit their mothers/families and "mother churches." With no servants to wait on them, several local families are meeting at a hotel for lunch to celebrate the upcoming wedding of two of their children, Emma Hobday and Paul Sherrington, whose older brothers and friends all died in the recent Great War.  

Jane Fairchild, a 22-year-old maid for one of the families, is an orphan with no family to visit, and plans to spend the day reading a book from her employer's library when a telephone call changes the course of her day and, ultimately, her life. It's Paul -- her secret lover for the past 7 years -- inviting her to join him at his parents' empty house, before he joins his fiancee for lunch. It will be his and Jane's last meeting before he marries Emma and moves to London to practice law. 

While the main story unfolds on this one day (a day that changes everything for Jane), the narrative moves backwards and forwards in time. We learn about Jane's past and also about what happens to her in the future. There's not a lot of action -- but there's a lot of reflection on books, on writing and storytelling, truth and fiction and memory.  

My original rating was 3.5 stars rounded up to 4 stars on Goodreads. I'm increasing that to a solid 4 stars. As I said in my original review, this probably won't be everyone's cup of tea -- but it made me think, and the writing is beautiful. I'm glad I took the time to re-read it.   

Have you read this (or seen the movie version that came out last year)? (I haven't seen the movie yet, but I'd like to.)  What did you think?  

Our Zoom discussion of this book hasn't been scheduled yet, but we've already announced that our July book will be "The Bullet That Missed (The Thursday Murder Club #3)" by Richard Osman (which I read when it came out last fall and reviewed here).  

This was Book #23 read to date in 2023 (and Book #1 finished in June), bringing me to 51% of my 2023 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 45 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 5 books ahead of schedule. :)  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2023 tagged as "2023 books."