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After You'd Gone

Name: After You'd Gone
Author: Maggie O'Farrell
ISBN: 9780142000328

by Maggie O'Farrell

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Overview

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 and marks the debut of a major literary talent.

Synopsis

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 and marks the debut of a major literary talent.

"It's the depiction of . . . deceptively small moments that is O'Farrell's winning gift. . . . Her absorbing characters gracefully circle one another 'round the room like moths at the light bulb,' grazing their wings against life's raw heat instead of being consumed by it." (The New York Times Book Review)

"After You'd Gone is beautifully written contemporary fiction." (Edna O'Brien, The Sunday Times)

New York Times Book Review - Maud Casey

While skillfully employing interwoven multiple points of view . . . O'Farrell performs a traditional, old-fashioned storytelling striptease, seductively unveiling layer after layer of revelatory secrets.

About the Author, Maggie O'Farrell

The author of such international bestsellers as After You'd Gone and The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, British novelist Maggie O'Farrell crafts complex, multi-layered narratives that move back and forth in time and unfold from several perspectives.

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
Last season we selected a Booker Prize finalist for Discover, Trezza Azzopardi's The Hiding Place. This season, we've chosen another first novel from across the Great Pond with a similar sense of truths hidden, as if suspended under ice. In Maggie O'Farrell's gripping debut, Alice Raikes, a grieving young widow, takes a train from London to visit her family in Scotland. But after witnessing something shocking in the restroom at the station, she abruptly heads back to London without a word, leaving her sisters perplexed. A few hours later, Alice steps out into traffic, is hit by a car, and lies in a coma. Was it an accident or a suicide attempt? Family gathers at her bedside as Alice drifts in and out of consciousness, remembering her childhood, her first romance, and the love of her life -- her now-deceased husband, John, a journalist felled by a bomb. Like a lens slowly coming into focus, Alice's voice is blurred with the voices of her loved ones, until the true image of Alice's identity becomes clear. A fascinating story of families in which painful, buried truths finally come to the surface, After You'd Gone is also a warning of sorts to those who hold secrets. With searing honesty and depth, Maggie O'Farrell combines a tragic love story with tension-filled moments of suspense cleverly mixed with the ingredients of coincidence and chance. An ambitious debut, this first novel promises to break the hearts of those who search the truths lying within its pages. (Spring 2001 Selection)

Maud Casey

Los Angeles Times

O'Farrell has written a deeply elusive book, one made more mysterious, somehow, by her wonderful sense of detail.

Boston Globe

...utterly beautiful...poetic and wise...a lovely and fully realized performance.

Seattle Times

After You'd Gone is a memorable first novel.

Baltimore Sun

...a memorable debut and a headily promising one...a fine novel...a work of depth.

Plain Dealer

This first novel delivers; let there be more.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Like a pointillist painting, this fine debut is, from one perspective, formless--short vignettes, told from multiple points of view and in multiple voices, that are somewhat puzzling on their own and apparently have no connection to each other. Ultimately, however, these elements merge into a coherent and moving portrait of a young woman's journey toward a life-threatening crisis. In London, one cold day in late fall, Alice Raikes impulsively boards a train home to Scotland. Shortly after joining her two sisters in the Edinburgh train station, she sees something "odd and unexpected and sickening" in the station's restroom that causes her immediately to flee back to London. Later that evening, while walking to the grocery store, Alice broods over what she has seen, then abruptly steps into oncoming traffic. As she lies comatose in her hospital bed, a swirl of voices and images gradually reveals her past--her parents, especially her mother, Ann; her beloved grandmother, Elspeth; her two sisters, so unlike her, both physically and temperamentally; and John Friedman, whom she loved and lost--and hints at her precarious future. The unnamed spectacle of the opening washroom scene resurfaces in Alice's semiconscious haze, and its eventual elucidation comes as less of a shock than a confirmation of all we have learned about her tumultuous existence. Sharply observed details of everyday life and language, original and telling figures of speech and deftly handled plot twists reach a moving climax, while subtly raising the question of whether the objects of Alice's affection--and the sources of her agony--were worth enduring. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

It is hard to believe that such an assured work comes from a first novelist. Starting in London with a young woman stepping off a curb in front of an oncoming car, O'Farrell gradually lays bare the harrowing realization that prompted the suicide attempt. On one level, this is a love story; on another it is an intergenerational tale of three women (grandmother Elspeth, mother Ann, and Alice, the victim). But to describe it as such sounds platitudinous, which it is definitely not. With smooth prose, O'Farrell moves seamlessly among the victim's family and friends and back and forth in time in seemingly random fashion, slowly revealing her characters' pasts and stunningly bringing the story back to the present. Despite its premise, this is not a depressing book. Published originally in the UK to good reviews, it should appeal to fans of Mary Gordon and Margaret Atwood, though it will draw a more popular audience than the latter.--Francine Fialkoff, "Library Journal" Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

First-time novelist O'Farrell powerfully reworks a seemingly familiar tale. At the outset, Alice Raikes is suffering from some terrible, unexplained hurt. Impulsively she dashes from her North London home to see her sisters in Edinburgh. But while they're picking her up at the train station, she sees something that upsets her even more and minutes later jumps back on the train to London. That night she's hit by a car, either accidentally or as the result of a suicide attempt. After this mysterious and disturbing prologue, O'Farrell proceeds to tell the story of three generations of Raikes women and their lives in the small Scottish town of North Berwick, focusing primarily on Alice. Her actions in the opening pages are actually not really atypical: Alice is impetuous and moody, unlike her precise, chilly English mother and her quiet, methodical Scots grandmother. O'Farrell constructs the saga of these three women as a series of brief, interlocking vignettes, shifting between many layers of past and present, juggling some half-dozen different viewpoints. Deeply felt but very secret pain is the attribute that unites all of these characters, even Alice's barely glimpsed father-in-law, whose absence turns out to be a pivotal element in the story. Alice's seeming suicide attempt is a catalyst, a stone thrown into a pool that precipitates ripples of misery that wash back into the past and forward to the future. O'Farrell is an astute observer of little behaviors, the telling fidgets and habits of everyday existence, and she's at her best when piecing these together to create a sense of a real life experienced through fiction. The complex structure works beautifully, communicating the shared and interlocking sufferings of the Raikes women through its carefully worked-out layering of narrative lines. Often painful to read, but finally quite satisfying.