Published in 2023
388 pages
Maggie O’Farrell, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, is the author of Hamnet, Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020, and the memoir I Am, I Am, I Am, both Sunday Times no. 1 bestsellers. Her novels include After You’d Gone, My Lover’s Lover, The Distance Between Us, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine, which won the 2010 Costa Novel Award, Instructions for a Heatwave and This Must Be the Place, and The Marriage Portrait. She is also the author of two books for children, Where Snow Angels Go and The Boy Who Lost His Spark. She lives in Edinburgh.
What is this book about?
The stunning, groundbreaking debut novel of wrenching love and grief from the New York Times bestselling author of The Marriage Portrait and National Book Circle Award Winner Hamnet
Alice Raikes takes a train from London to Scotland to visit her family, but when she gets there she witnesses something so shocking that she insists on returning to London immediately. A few hours later, Alice is lying in a coma after an accident that may or may not have been a suicide attempt. Alice’s family gathers at her bedside and as they wait, argue, and remember, long-buried tensions emerge. The more they talk, the more they seem to conceal. Alice, meanwhile, slides between varying levels of consciousness, recalling her past and a love affair that recently ended. A riveting story that skips through time and interweaves multiple points of view, After You’d Gone is a novel of stunning psychological depth, marking the debut of a major literary talent.
