SIZE, as the cliche has it, is not everything, although publishers apparently believe otherwise, burying us recently beneath an avalanche of bestsellers bigger than breeze blocks.

From Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (3,600 pages) and the Man-Booker-prizewinner A Brief History of Seven Killings (704 pages) by Marlon James, to the pressing need of late to pick up War and Peace (1,250 pages) again, followed by an appointment with a physiotherapist. As another cliche has it, however, good things come in small packages, too: Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time (192 pages), American novelist Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton (193 pages) and the brilliant Graham Swift’s Mothering Sunday: A Romance (a slim 132 pages).

Mothering Sunday is a dazzling read: sexy, stylish, subversive. You finish it and immediately read it again, because, like War and Peace, it’s a marvellous novel of possibilities. The novel is the length it deserves to be, says Swift, because he believes “in intensity, economy and concision, in saying quite a lot in a few words, and even then saying it with quite simple words.

It’s part of the art of writing. I always knew it was not going to be long. Some of the last work I did it on it was to make it shorter. It is not a small book; it is complete, very complete,” he says over lunch at Tate Britain, in London, where he was born and lives with his writer wife, Candice Rodd.

I tell Cambridge-educated Swift, who won the Guardian fiction prize for his 1983 novel, Waterland, and the Booker Prize for his masterly Last Orders (1996), that I intend to read Mothering Sunday over and over. Apparently, I am not the first person to tell him that they have read the novel twice. Of course, he says, sipping from a glass of white wine, it pleases him. Mothering Sunday takes place during a day in the life – and a life in the day – of Jane Fairchild, a 22-year-old housemaid, who has been having a passionate affair for almost seven years with Paul Sheringham, son of a wealthy Berkshire landowner. He may be posh but she’s clever.

Each year, servants were given a day off on Mothering Sunday – the fourth Sunday in Lent – to visit their mothers. Jane is an orphan, a foundling, so she has no mother to see on March 30, 1924. Instead, she spends the sun-drenched morning having sex with Paul, in his own bed, before he drives off for a fateful assignation with the fiancee he is soon to marry. After he leaves, the still-naked Jane wanders around the manor house, lingering in the library because she loves to read adventure stories and the works of Joseph Conrad – that morning she had read of his death in the newspaper she placed on her employer’s breakfast table.

The structure of the novel, which has the epigraph, “You shall go to the ball,” throws us forward into the future as well as exploring the past and the concerns of memory that have aways pervaded Swift’s fiction. We discover that Jane, with her rich, inner life, gives up domestic service to go to Oxford – not to study at the university, but to work in a bookshop, read avidly and take other lovers. She becomes a famous novelist and before she dies at the age of 98 is for ever being interviewed about her 19 books. In the last paragraph of the novel, she thinks, “Enough of this interview claptrap and chicanery... they would always want even the explanation explained.”

If 66-year-old Swift, who has a highly acclaimed body of work, including his excellent short story collection, England and Other Stories (2014), thinks this particular interview full of claptrap and chicanery, he gives no hint. With his ironic, angular features and impish sense of humour, he is unpretentious and naturally soft-spoken, although he exudes quiet confidence – as he should.

For Mothering Sunday, his tenth novel, is a ravishing work of art. Fittingly the dust jacket, which he chose, features a detail from a great artwork, Modigliani’s Reclining Nude (red nude) in which the model “offers herself to the painter, lying back on a rich red bed, eyes as black as desire,” according to one critic when the painting sold last November for $170m.

Swift says: “Nowhere are we told what Jane looks like, only that her hands are a maid’s hands, red. I don’t describe my characters. I have a very strong sense of Jane’s presence but I don’t even know the colour of her eyes. She begins as a blank slate but with a very real sense of her own possibilities.”
Despite a successful literary career filled with many possibilities, Swift remains in awe of the mysterious creative process. It does not do to analyse it, he acknowledges. “If you lost that, something would be very wrong. It really is one of the thrills of writing. As for this novel and where it came from, one day it wasn’t there and the next day it was. That is one of the rare joys of being a writer. I have no recollection of there being any sort of preamble. 

“I started the book more or less the way it is. There was this couple in bed together, they have been lovers for a while, but who are they? She was of another class, a housemaid. Then boom, boom, boom! She has no family, no mother, all these things, including the glorious weather. Boom, boom, boom! The previous day I was just this writer wondering, ‘What am I going to do next?’ Honestly, I don’t know where it came from. It’s when being a writer is so thrilling, so compelling, so joyful.

When I began Last Orders, it was a similar thing – these four, five blokes meet in a pub. I just had these characters and it was all to do with the fact that one of their friends had died. It was the same with Mothering Sunday, it was just there...” he clicks his fingers. “I knew that this was going to be the sort of novel that I hoped the reader would take in one breath. I think that when you get to the end it takes you right back to the beginning, something is building up about the nature of fiction itself.”

This is not the first time that Swift has written a novel that spans one day. Last Orders, Tomorrow (2007) and The Light of Day (2003) are all set over a single day, although the narratives reach back decades. “I can’t deny it. I have done this more and more. There is something I like about the idea of one day. I delight in the trope. It works for me, with flashbacks and forward that I find very emotional. There is always a subliminal sense in my work that life is short, but a day, that we are not here for ever. Seize the day!”

At the end of her days Jane thinks of writing fiction, “It’s about being true to the very stuff of life, it was about trying to capture, though you never could, the very feel of being alive... that many things in life... can never be explained at all.”

Which explains why Swift does no research. He believes it’s a destroyer of the imagination. “I looked up details about the traditions of Mothering Sunday, which is not to be confused with Mother’s Day. But research is anathema to me.” Why did he subtitle Mothering Sunday, which is gorgeously erotic and opens with the words, “Once upon a time...,” a romance?
“I am so glad you said that it’s full of sexy stuff. As for the romance, I have never given any of my novels a subtitle before and perhaps it has elements of whimsy. But it is a romance, it’s a love story. It is also a romance in the sense of someone’s quest to become the person they want to become. 

The other reason is that in other languages – not English – a romance is a novel. It’s me saying this is a novel about ‘novelness’ and the nature of fiction and why it matters. And it’s about a housemaid who becomes a writer so it’s a sort of Cinderella story, a sort of fairytale, although there’s a lot of stuff going on that is far from fairytale. It’s a very joyful idea -- the process of becoming, the making of a writer.” 

I tell Swift that I want to read Jane’s novels – we are told about several of them and various characters, some based on those she knew during her years in service. “So do I,” he replies. “But I don’t think either of us will, although there are even some titles in there.” He falls silent. Who knows, perhaps one morning Jane Fairchild’s 1950s novel, In the Mind’s Eye, will be in his mind one day when it wasn’t the day before? “You have put a notion in my head that has never popped up before,” he says, smiling enigmatically.

Mothering Sunday: A Romance, by Graham Swift (Scribner, £12.99)