Swiss Sonata is the first novel by Gwethalyn Graham, written when she was just 25. The novel is set in a girls’ boarding school in Switzerland in 1936. What makes this novel extraordinary is not just the penetrating insights into the behaviour of the girls — echoed later in novels such as The Wives of Bath — but for her timely insights into the dark clouds of war and hatred gathering over all of Europe at the time.

Gwethalyn Graham was born January 18, 1913 in Toronto. Her father was a lawyer, her mother entertained numerous international figures of importance in their home, and both encouraged their four children to think for themselves — theirs was a family which set the rules rather than followed them. At the age of 25, in 1938, she won her first Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction for her novel Swiss Sonata. After Earth and High Heaven, Gwethalyn wrote for Saturday Night, Chatelaine, and for film and television, and completed a collection of letters with Solange Chaput Roland titled Dear Enemies (1963). Gwethalyn died in 1965.

Gwethalyn Graham's profile page

• Winner, Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction