Sarah Sheard's award-winning first novel, Almost Japanese, was a mesmerizing tale of first love that received international acclaim.  Her new novel is a compelling story of a woman bound to her mother by all the familiar, complicated ties of love and obligation--and by a history of family madness that entrapped her lovely, willful mother and now haunts her own life.  As a child she learns--sometimes with comic results--to weave a web of protective secrecy around her chaotic and fragile household.  Grown up, she returns home to discover what the boundaries are that separate mothers from daughters--and in the process to define herself. Wryly funny, compassionate, and deeply moving, The Swing Era is a novel about love and pain and the ties that bind, about casting off the past and find the future.