Afterwards
A Novel
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
When Alice and Joseph meet, they fall quickly into a tentative but sincere relationship. She is a nurse, he a house painter, and while both are still young and hopeful about this new love, each of them carries an emotional burden. Alice's father has been a yawning absence all her life, and just recently her beloved grandmother—who helped to raise her-passed away. For his part, Joseph refuses to speak about his experiences as a soldier in Northern Ireland, and Alice suspects that his general reticence hides an even more deeply troubled past. In this powerful story of guilt and privacy, Seiffert asks: To love someone, must you know everything about them?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Britain's ongoing involvement in Northern Ireland threatens the budding romance between Londoners Alice, a physical therapist, and Joseph, a decorator and house painter, in Seiffert's psychologically acute, relentlessly grim second novel (following the Booker shortlisted The Dark Room). Almost a decade has passed since Joseph, then a soldier, killed a suspected IRA terrorist at a military checkpoint. The incident haunts him, sometimes makes him violent and prevents him from forming serious attachments. Alice resents that Joseph is essentially shutting her out of his life. Her frustration is compounded by the birth father who's rejected her, and by the recent death of her maternal grandmother. Alice tenuously cares for her grandfather, David, whose emotional remoteness may be linked to his stint with the RAF in 1950s Kenya. When Joseph good-naturedly offers to do some free decorating at David's house, an easy rapport develops between the two reticent men, until things go wrong. Although the characters' politics are simplistic, Seiffert masterfully chronicles the trajectory, and the causes, of Alice and Joseph's damaged relationship. Her beautifully understated, pointed exploration of the emotional toll of guerrilla war shines with clarity and vision.
