The Masons are a prominent family living in Swan, a small town in Georgia. As SWAN opens, a bizarre crime pulls Ginger Mason home from her life in Italy: the body of her mother, Catherine, a suicide nineteen years before, has been mysteriously exhumed. Reunited with her troubled brother, JJ, 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, they are confronted with startling truths in 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 about the complexity of family ties, SWAN marks the remarkable fiction debut of one of America's best-loved writers.