| Review by Julie Saffrin |
| After You'd Gone |
| by Maggie O'Farrell |
| Alice Raikes boards a train to visit her sisters in Scotland. Upon seeing something horrible at the train station, she immediately returns to London, where she is hit by a car and knocked into a coma. While waiting to find out if Alice will wake up from her netherworld, the people in her life visit her at the hospital. |
| The reader is shuttled, sometimes jarred, back and forth in time at breakneck speed with family, friends, former lovers, and how they interact with each other while they await Alice's come-back-to-earth. |
| It is hard to believe this book is O'Farrell's first race out of the starting gate of novel writing. Roses of "...yellow yolk brightness" ... "a necklace of sulphorous yellow street lights" ... Jellyfish that line the beach with their "clammy glue," these are the images O'Ferrell evokes for the reader in this upstart novel. Her verbal dexterity with subplots and multi-layered characters, of which there are several dozen, glistens like a feisty two-year old filly who breaks away from the pack. |
| O'Ferrell speaks each character's language and range of emotion fluently. From sadness to joy, to outright laughout loud funny, O'Farrell pounds the emotional track of her reader's mind with an unrelenting swiftness that will keep you up reading with a flashlight at night until you cross the finish line. |
| Not only has O' Farrell hit her stride with this one, she's earned the right to be on the track with the best in the business. |