They Came Like Swallows

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, deftly rendering the civilities and constraints of a vanished era, paints an intensely moving portrait of an American family and the woman who is its emotional pillar.

About the Author

William Maxwell was born in Illinois in 1908. 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. So Long, See You Tomorrow won the American Book Award, and he received the PEN/Malamud Award. He died in New York in 2000. Ann Patchett is the author of several novels including The Patron Saint of Liars, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Taft, which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, The Magician's Assistant, for which she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and Bel Canto, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Orange Prize, the Booksense Book of the Year Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her non-fiction book, Truth & Beauty, was a New York Times Bestseller and the winner of a Books for a Better Life Award. Ann was the editor for Best American Short Stories 2006. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. Ann has written for many publications, including Harper's, Gourmet, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, and The Washington Post. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.