After You'd Gone - Couverture rigide

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)

Early praise for AFTER YOU'D GONE:

'Impressively confident and gripping' Boyd Tonkin, Independent

'A fine novelist' The Times

'Harrowing, profound and beautifully written' Independent on Sunday

'A first novel with considerable psychological depth, excellent dialogue and always convincing. There is very real talent here... Definitely an author to watch' Publishing News

'[An] assured and seductive tale of adult loss... In sensitive and almost blood-curdlingly honest detail, O'Farrell has constructed a love story dealing with the need to mine the past for clues to the present' Literary Review

'AFTER YOU'D GONE is incredibly affecting. Not because its story is unusual, but because O'Farrell really captures the power families hold. No matter how you try to cut the bonds, they always seem to choke you in the end. 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 make this an effortless read... Such emotional delicacy really distinguishes this compulsively readable and accomplished first novel' Lesley Glaister, Independent on Sunday

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, where a traffic accident leaves her in a coma.

AFTER YOU'D GONE follows Alice's mental journey into how she came to be this way, as she twists together threads of memory in a plot that grips from the outset. It is a love story which is also a story of absence - we discover that Alice's lover, John, has been dead for a year by the time the book starts - and of parental legacies: how actions and choices can reverberate in following generations. Slowly, we are drawn closer to a dark secret at the family's heart, as Alice begins to wonder whether she will ever be whole again, or even survive.