About this book 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.
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