Book reviews roundup: Mothering Sunday; The Button Box; City of Thorns

What the critics thought of Mothering Sunday by Graham Swfit, The Button Box by Lynn Knight and City of Thorns Ben Rawlence

Graham Swift, whose profile had dipped since his Booker-winning Last Orders two decades ago, was agreed to be back on top form with what John Sutherland in the Times described as “an erotic novelette”. Mothering Sunday is a compact tale of an upstairs-downstairs affair, a moment of tragedy and a housemaid’s intellectual awakening – is set in 1924 on the one day of the year that female servants were guaranteed a holiday. Sutherland tipped this “antidote to the cloying sentimentalities of Downton Abbey” for the Man Booker list, but pointed out that, at 132 pages, it could reignite the debate about length that raged when Ian McEwan’s novella On Chesil Beach made the 2007 shortlist. (Indeed, James Runcie in the Independent described the book as “On Chesil Beach, only with better sex”.) Hannah Beckerman in the Observer called the book “powerful, philosophical and exquisitely observed”; in one sense it is “a feminist story – the orphan put into service at 14 who finds her voice, her independence and a successful profession. But it is also a fairy story, a story of poverty, of serendipity, of ambition and of transformation.” “The archly modulated, precise prose (a hybrid of Henry Green and Kazuo Ishiguro) is a glory to read,” confirmed Ian Thomson in the Evening Standard. “Now 66, Swift is a writer at the very top of his game.”

Lynn Knight’s The Button Box relates history through haberdashery, as Knight uses a collection of buttons and scraps inherited from her grandmother as a starting point to explore “the fabric, literal and metaphorical, of the women who wore them. It’s a brilliant notion,” wrote Daisy Goodwin in the Sunday Times, while Jane Shilling in the Daily Mail admired a “fascinating social history” that illustrates Virginia Woolf’s dictum that clothes “change our view of the world and the world’s view of us”. Shirley Whiteside in the Independent on Sunday called it “an important book, tracing the enormous changes in women’s lives through the humblest of fastenings”. But Rachel Cooke in the Observer found the book’s “dribs and drabs of history, personal and garnered” made it “a one-thing-after-another kind of a book: delightful in places and lovely to dip into, but on the wearying side if read from start to finish”.

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