A momentous decision is made; a moment of dreadful destruction follows. Events are narrated quietly, almost discreetly, and they're all the more shocking for that.
The marvel of this little book is its unhurried, unforced inclusion of so much significance and drama in such a small space. Right from its emblematic opening, "Once upon a time, before the boys were killed and when there were more horses than cars ... ", you realise this will be a story far bigger than its 132 pages.
It's rich with cool yet lyrical prose and potent images: the taking of an orchid; the phone ringing in a house where everything is about to end.
It's also a story about stories, and "the great fabrication" of writing. Swift takes these tired tropes and works them into vistas of great distance and an even greater riddle. "You shall go to the ball," insists the epigraph, and the glimpses we get of Cinderella/Jane across the next seven decades show her lifted to the status of eminent writer, wry re-shaper of truth, obsessive archaeologist into this single day of her young womanhood.
"When you're reading a book," Swift has written elsewhere, "you're on a little island". In the case of Mothering Sunday, it's a little island of prodigious treasures. You're there during those hours that briefly held breath almost a century ago. Like Jane, you're transfigured.
Mothering Sunday
By Graham Swift
(Scribner $35)
