After You'd Gone [Paperback]

Like a pointillist painting, Maggie O'Farrell's fine debut After You'd Gone 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 autumn, 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 to immediately flee back to London. Later that evening, while walking to the grocers, 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. --Alex Freeman

'an engrossing study of loss and family ties, delivered with the page-turning pace of a thriller'

'This weepy, now out in paperback, is guaranteed to leave you out of Kleenex... your life stands still as you turn the pages. An amazing study of love and grief as it poses the wrenching question: What do you do with all the love you have for someone when they're gone?' (Glamour )

'A memorable debut' (Daily Telegraph )

'Maggie O'Farrell keeps the reader guessing right up to the end in this engrossing psychological mystery... the characterisation is excellent and the dialogue immaculate' (Sunday Telegraph )

'an engrossing study of loss and family ties, delivered with the page-turning pace of a thriller' (Independent on Sunday )

Maggie O'Farrell's groundbreaking debut: a stunning, best-selling story of wrenching love and grief.

A distraught young woman boards a train at King's Cross to return to her family in Scotland. Six hours later, she catches sight of something so terrible in a mirror at Waverley Station that she gets on the next train back to London.

AFTER YOU'D GONE follows Alice's mental journey through her own past, after a traffic accident has left her in a coma. A love story that is also a story of absence, and of how our choices can reverberate through the generations, it slowly draws us closer to a dark secret at the family's heart.

Extracts from the press coverage for AFTER YOU'D GONE.
I thought you might be interested to see some of the remarkable coverage we've had for this wonderful debut:

'Harrowing, profound and beautifully written' Independent on Sunday

'Incredibly affecting... a devastating debut' The Face

'O'Farrell is blessed with a tender, solicitous intelligence... honest, moving and wise beyond its author's years' Time Out

'O'Farrell's clean, pellucid prose makes this an effortless read... such emotional delicacy really distinguishes this compulsively readable and accomplished first novel' Lesley Glaister, Independent on Sunday

'A poignant tragedy punctuated only with happy moments from a brighter past. A girl in a coma, a love affair tragically aborted, a religious tangle and a disturbed relationship between mother and daughter all add up to a gripping and emotionally engaging novel' Sunday Express

'What makes this book remarkable is a luminous use of language and imagery which turn Alice's world into one of elements and of sensation' Observer --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Maggie O`Farrell is the author of five novels, AFTER YOU`D GONE, MY LOVER`S LOVER, THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, THE VANISHING ACT OF ESME LENNOX, and THE HAND THAT FIRST HELD MINE, which won the 2010 Costa Novel Award. She lives in Edinburgh.

The only bit Alice can see of her father is the soles of his shoes. They are a faded brown, striated with the grit and terrain of the pavements he has walked. She is allowed to run along the pavement outside their house to meet him coming home from work in the evening. In the summertime she sometimes runs in her nightie, its pale folds catching around her knees. But now it's winter _ November, maybe. The soles of the shoes are curved around the branch of a tree at the bottom of their garden. She tips back her head as far as it will go. The foliage rustles and thrashes. Her father's voice swears. She feels a shout welling like tears in her throat, then the coarse orange rope lowers itself, slightly coiled like a cobra from the branches.

`Got it?'

She seizes the rope's waxed head in her mittened hand. `Yes.'

The branches shake as her father swings down. He lays a hand briefly on Alice's shoulder then bends to pick up the tyre. She is fascinated by the meandering rivulets that wander through its tread and the weft underneath its heavy black rubber. `That's what holds it together,' the man at the shop had told her. The sudden scraped bald patch in the middle of the meanders makes her shudder but she doesn't quite know why. Her father winds the orange rope around the tyre and makes a thick, twisted knot.

`Can I have a go now?' Her hands grip the tyre.

`No. I have to test it with my weight first.'

Alice watches as her father jounces on the tyre, testing to see if it is safe enough for her. She looks up to see the branch shake in sympathy and looks quickly back at her father. What if he were to fall? But he is getting off and lifting her on, her bones as small, white and bendable as birds'.

Alice and John sit in a cafe in a village in the Lake District. It's early autumn. She holds up a sugar cube between finger and thumb, the light behind it making its crystals the massed cells of an intricate organism under a microscope.

`Did you know,' says John, `that someone did a chemical analysis of sugar cubes in cafe sugar bowls and that they found strong traces of blood, semen, faeces and urine?'

She keeps her face serious. `I didn't know that, no.'

He holds her deadpan gaze until the edges of his mouth are tugged downwards. Alice gets hiccups and he shows her how to cure them by drinking out of the opposite side of a glass. Beyond them, through the window, a plane draws a sheer white line on the sky.

She looks at John's hands, breaking up a bread roll, and suddenly knows she loves him. She looks away, out of the window, and sees for the first time the white line made by the plane. It has by this time drifted into woolliness. She thinks about pointing it out to John, but doesn't.

Alice's sixth summer was hot and dry. Their house had a large garden with the kitchen window looking out over the patio and garden so whenever Alice and her sisters were playing outside they could look up and see their mother watching over them. The freakish heat dried up the reservoirs, previously unheard- of in Scotland, and she went with her father to a pump at the end of the street to collect water in round white vats. The water drummed into their empty bottoms. Half-way between the house and the end of the garden was the vegetable patch where peas, potatoes and beetroot pushed their way up from thick, dark soil. On a particularly bright day that summer, Alice stripped off her clothes, scooped up clods of that earth and smeared it in vivid tiger stripes all over her body.

She scared the pious, nervous children next door by roaring at them through the hedge until her mother rapped on the window-pane and shouted at her to stop that at once. She retreated into the undergrowth to collect twigs and leaves to construct a wigwam-shaped lair. Her younger sister stood outside the lair and whinged to be let in. Alice said, only if you are a tiger. Beth looked at the soil and then at her clothes and then at their mother's face in the kitchen window. Alice sat in the moist dark with her stripes, growling and gazing at the triangle of sky visible through the top of the lair.

`You thought you were a little African boy, didn't you?'

She sits in the bath, her hair plastered into dripping spikes, and her grandmother soaps her back and front. The skin of her grandmother's hands feels roughened. The water is grey-brown, full of the garden's soil, lifted off her skin. In the next room she can hear the thrum of her father's voice, talking on the telephone.

`Don't cover yourself in soil again, will you, Alice?'

Her skin looks lighter under the water. Is this what skin looks like when it's dead?

`Alice? Promise me you won't do it again.'

She nods her head, spraying water over the ceramic sides of the yellow bath. Her grandmother towels her back. `Wee angel wings,' she says, patting Alice's shoulder-blades dry. `Everyone was an angel once, and this is where our wings would have been.'

She twists her head around to see the jutting isosceles triangle of bone flex and retract beneath her skin, as if preparing for celestial flight. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.