They Came Like Swallows
Book description
Discover William Maxwell's classic, heart-breaking portrait of an ordinary American family struck by the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic
'A story of such engaging warmth that it would thaw the heart of any critic... Will melt many a reader to tears' TIME
Elizabeth Morison is an ordinary woman.
Yet, to eight-year-old…
Why read it?
2 authors picked They Came Like Swallows as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
This book is on most serious writers’ shelves. It’s gorgeous. I loved being in the mind of a child over a century ago, dealing with the Spanish Flu (never believing we would face something as bad as Covid). Here was a lovely mother, all one could wish a mother to be and a child so in love with her that he can hardly comprehend her vulnerability.
Love and loss are beautifully rendered. Yes, it’s sad, but I was so involved that I pulled for the father to heal from his grief and make way for his son to heal as…
From Kathleen's list on novels in which children survive incredible odds.
This book is an old favorite of mine, and I picked up again after decades of not having read it because it deals with a child’s experience of his mother’s death during the 1918 influenza pandemic.
As a historian of childhood, I was thinking about the experiences of children during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and of this past one. I recalled that this was the best book I had read that captured the feeling of losing a mother and the family transformation that followed.
It is a beautifully written, melancholy book. So much is left unsaid by the…
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