Swan, Frances Mayes
Swan, Frances Mayes
List: $17.95 | Sale: $12.57
Club: $8.97

Swan

Author: Frances Mayes

Narrator: Debra Monk

Unabridged: 10 hr 36 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/08/2002


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.

About The Author

Frances Mayes’s Tuscany memoirs, all published by Broadway Books, have a combined total of 2,000,000 copies in print. She is also the author of The Discovery of Poetry and five books of poetry. A native of Georgia, she now divides her time between San Francisco and Cortona, Italy.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Barner on April 20, 2011

It appears I like this novel more than other readers: I LOVED it. Francis Mayes, author of "Under the Tuscan Sun," has written a novel taking place at an archelogical dig in Itlay, a humid, small town of Swan, Georgia, and, finally, Palo Alto, Ca. A brother and sister, close in their appreciation an......more

Goodreads review by Sharon on June 09, 2018

Swan, a small Southern Georgia town is home to the Mason Family;who has lived there for generations. A peculair event brought Ginger Mason home from Italy to try to understand what really happened in the local cemetery. Her Mother had died over nineteen years earlier of an aparent self inflicted gun s......more

Goodreads review by Lisa on June 28, 2012

The story itself was good, moved a liitle slowly, like a hot, humid Georgia summer, which when the story takes place. The ending however was very dissappointing, it just stopped. There were still things left unfifnshed.......more

Goodreads review by Lynn on October 10, 2014

I absolutely loved this book. The author made the transition from Italy to Georgia easy to follow, and the hint of mystery of what really happened to Catherine was never resolved in my mind. And did J.J. go back to California to pursue his love interest.? Is there another follow-up book? So many que......more

Goodreads review by Lois on June 23, 2015

Expected to like this one more than I did......more


Quotes

"This remains a solid read, sure to please readers who enjoy Southern fiction."
-Library Journal

"An assured fiction debut...Like Richard Russo's novel Empire Falls, it smartly dissects and dynamics of small-town relationships and the interplay between prominent families and the less powerful over several generations...carefully constructed...you'll fall for "Swan."
-USA Today

"Fueled by irresistable, page-turning questions."
-San Francisco Chronicle

"A painstaking study of a small Southern town and its people...combining [Mayes's] talent for vivid scene-setting that [she] showed in "Tuscan Sun" with deft plotting and solid character development."
-St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Loaded with finely-drawn minor characters and the alluring atmosphere of the American South, Swan is a well-paced...entertainment."
-New York Times Book Review