Synopsis
By the #1 bestselling author of Under the Tuscan Sun, Bella Tuscany and In Tuscany, Swan is a haunting novel set in the deep South -- a resonant tale of long-buried family secrets and mysteries brought suddenly to light.
In her celebrated memoirs of life in Tuscany, Frances Mayes writes masterfully about people in a powerful and shaping place. In Swan, her first novel, she has created an equally intimate world, rich with striking characters and intriguing twists of fate, that hearkens back to her southern roots.
The Masons are a prominent but now fragmented family who have lived for generations in Swan, an edenic, hidebound small town in Georgia. As Swan opens, a bizarre crime pulls Ginger Mason home from her life as an archeologist in Italy: The body of her mother, Catherine, a suicide nineteen years before, has been mysteriously exhumed. Reunited on new terms with her troubled, isolated brother J.J., who has never ventured far from Swan, the Mason children grapple with the profound effects of their mother's life and death on their own lives. When a new explanation for Catherine’s death emerges, and other closely guarded family secrets rise to the surface as well, Ginger and J.J. are confronted with startling truths about their family, a particular ordeal in a family and a town that wants to keep the past buried.
Beautifully evoking the rhythms and idiosyncrasies of the deep South while telling an utterly compelling story of the complexity of family ties, Swan marks the remarkable fiction debut of one of America’s best-loved writers.
From the Hardcover edition.
Book Magazine
This fiction debut attempts to be all things to all readers: a romance, a murder mystery, a literary novel. There's even a bumbling Episcopal priest running around town. Mayes, author of five books of poetry, three memoirs and a fine book on reading and writing poetry, depends here on numerous literary references and eccentric characters. Primarily set during a week in July 1975, the book focuses on a pair of sensitive and brooding siblings: J.J. is a thirty-three year old with commitment problems; his sister, Ginger, is a thirty-one-year-old archeologist specializing in Etruscan digs and Italian men. Along with numerous friends, townspeople and Southern grotesques (including the one-legged postmaster), J.J. and Ginger investigate the desecration of their mother's grave. The body of Catherine, who presumably committed suicide, has been turned out of the coffin, revealing that she was murdered. In this book about the deep South, caricature, literary cliché and purple prose overshadow character development and setting.