Rachel Seiffert’s first book, The Dark Room, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, announced the arrival of a major writer; Afterwards fulfills that promise with a stunning novel about war and its brutal after-effect.

Alice is the protagonist of Afterwards, but this book is about the guilt harboured by people around her. There are two men in her life: her maternal grandfather, David, recently widowed, and her boyfriend, Joseph, each of whom keeps his past from his loved ones. David served in Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion; Joseph, during a stint in the British army, served in Northern Ireland. Both, we learn, live with the memory of having killed in the line of duty.

As Alice’s relationship with Joseph develops, she senses there is something about his past that he keeps hidden. This is particularly galling given the personal and emotional details she has revealed to him (namely, that Alice has never met her father, and her attempts to establish an epistolary relationship with him in adulthood foundered). After her grandmother’s death, Alice finds the time spent with her grandfather awkward. She doesn’t know him the way she did her grandmother, but feels obliged to visit and offer support. Gradually, it emerges that David’s cold manner is traceable to events in Kenya, where he and his wife met. And as Alice tries to get to the bottom of Joseph’s reticence, a series of heated family discussions brushes ever closer to David’s secrets.


From the Hardcover edition.

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“Masterful, delightfully controlled prose. . . . This highly engaging novel continues to reveal itself long after it is read. It is a book, like its protagonists, that gives up its secrets slowly.”
—The Daily Telegraph

“[Afterwards] is about invisible borders, the hard-held Irish Border, the border between lovers, between generations, between past and present. It is a fine and profound work.”
—The Irish Times

“Vivid and achingly real. To read Afterwards is to bear witness to fully rendered characters sagging and broken under the weight of history. It’s powerful, disturbing stuff.”
—Edmonton Journal


From the Trade Paperback edition.

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Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room won a Betty Trask Award and the Los Angeles Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Seiffert has also received a David T. K. Wong award from PEN International. After living in Scotland and Germany, she now resides in London.


From the Hardcover edition.

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