Product Description

To love someone, need you know everything about them? When Alice and Joseph meet, they fall quickly into a tentative but serious relationship. She is a nurse, he a painter and decorator; both are still young and hopeful of each other, but each brings with them an emotional burden. Alice's father has been a yawning absence all her life, and her beloved grandmother - who helped raise her - has recently died. For his part, Joseph refuses to speak about his army experiences in Northern Ireland and Alice suspects that his general reticence hides an even more deeply troubled past. When her widowed grandfather begins to tell Joseph about his own RAF experiences in l950s Kenya - stories he had shared only with his wife - 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. Morally complex, understated, and powerfully moving, "Afterwards" confirms Rachel Seiffert's remarkable talent.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #198767 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Review
Booker nominee Seiffert's third novel (Field Study, 2004, etc.) is spare, sometimes powerful and a bit disappointing.Brits Alice and Joseph (a nurse and a plasterer, respectively) fall in something like love, but both bring along baggage and great reticence, and the relationship flounders. Alice's father, absent all her life, has lately let wither the correspondence she began as a belated, indirect way of getting to know him; her beloved grandmother has died, and she's tending to her grieving grandfather. Joseph has a troubled past. After a string of youthful petty crimes, he became a soldier in Northern Ireland - and what happened there he refuses to reveal. His experiences have left him scarred and skittish. He warily circles Alice: engaging for a while, retreating, engaging, retreating. When Alice's grandfather, for whom Joseph is doing some home renovation, divulges details of his military career in Kenya - details that he, also laconic and guilt-ridden, has long kept to himself - Joseph shrinks from the revelation with a raw, impulsive violence that estranges him from Alice for good. Seiffert's setup is daringly low-key: minimal plot; an aggressively plain, fragmentary style; two protagonists defined in large part by their awkwardness and taciturnity. Seiffert's prose is subtle and precise, and in psychological complexity she rivals Margot Livesey. Despite some similarities of approach, however, this book doesn't offer the layered suspense of Livesey's work. In this novel about ships passing sadly in the night, the middle passage of 200 pages is impressive, but the beginning and the end of the journey are not. A partial misfire by a gifted writer. (Kirkus Reviews)

Guardian
'An exploration of the metastasis of trauma, this is thoughtful and affecting'

The Daily Telegraph
`As the tension builds, the pace of Afterwards punches on like a pump-action steady stream of bullets ... it's bleakly compelling ...'