Afterwards
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Published:4th Oct '07
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
The new novel, another remarkable story of the complexities of guilt and moral responsibility, from the Booker-shortlisted author of The Dark Room and Field Study.
To love someone, need you know everything about them?
When Alice and Joseph meet, they fall quickly into a tentative but serious relationship.
When Alice's widowed grandfather begins to tell Joseph about his RAF experiences in 1950s Kenya, something still raw is tapped in Joseph;
To love someone, need you know everything about them?
When Alice and Joseph meet, they fall quickly into a tentative but serious relationship. Both are still young and hopeful of each other, but each brings with them an emotional burden. Alice's family is full of absences and Joseph harbours an unspeakable secret from his time in the army in Northern Ireland.
When Alice's widowed grandfather begins to tell Joseph about his RAF experiences in 1950s Kenya, something still raw is tapped in Joseph; his reaction to the older man's unburdening of guilt is both unexpected and devastating for them all.
Masterful, delightfully controlled prose...This highly engaging novel continues to reveal itself long after it is read * Sunday Telegraph *
Carefully unsentimental...remarkable...we are given the complicated substance of unadorned lives * Sunday Times *
Compelling... A daring work, sure to gain her greater recognition..the portrait of the ex-soldier Joseph is as fine a depiction of a man in crisis as you will read * Daily Telegraph *
A remarkable feat... precise and searing... One of the most intelligent and ethical writers of her generation * Literary Review *
Elegant... Authentic... One of the significant accomplishments of Afterwards is a coiling suspense driven more by psychology than circumstance * New York Times *
[Afterwards] is about invisible borders, the hard-held Irish border, the border between lovers, between generations, between past and present. It is a fine and profound work * Irish Times *
Seiffert returns to many of the themes of her first novel, The Dark Room: guilt, grief, memory and forgetting. But Afterwards also asks the questions about how much people can really know about the people they love * Independent *
Superb...the drama is balanced and the tension sustained...masterful * Financial Times *
Readers who wonder why... Martin Amis and... Kiran Desai seem to flinch from writing about their own times should study Ms Seiffert * Economist *
Rachel Seiffert is the poet and spokeswoman of those who find themselves on the wrong side of history...powerful, almost unbearably intense and wonderfully written * The Times *
ISBN: 9780099461777
Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 21mm
Weight: 234g
336 pages