A review by andintothetrees
After You'd Gone by Maggie O'Farrell

5.0

After You’d Gone is easily one of the best books I’ve read in 2012, if not one of the best books I’ve read, ever. It has certainly put Maggie O’Farrell on my favourite authors-whose-entire-back-catalogues-I-must-read list, and I can’t fathom why when I tried to read this in 2008 I didn’t get beyond the first few pages. Perhaps it was the disjointed narrative, which slips from present to past and back again, with a changing voice that sometimes differs even between paragraphs and was initially a little annoying. Once I became accustomed to it however I didn’t find it confusing or off-putting but rather dreamlike and almost hypnotic; although there were times where I felt tempted to skim over one line of plot to find out what was happening in another. Weaving together this web of stories is Alice Raikes, a twenty-nine year old woman who is in a coma following a (possibly not) accidental stepping out in front of a vehicle on a London evening sometime in the early noughties. Previously on that day she had been to Edinburgh to visit her sisters, but saw something that drove her to turn on her heel and head back down south, despite glimpsing it only for seconds. The novel addresses two questions: why would Alice even potentially have deliberately stepped into the traffic, and what did she see that was so terrible? In answering these questions the reader is taken on a journey through Alice’s life from pre-birth to the present day, with a particular focus on her apparently ordinary (and thus ordinarily dysfunctional) family and her love for a man named John, whose notable absence from her coma bedside also raises questions for the reader.

... [Read the rest of my review here: https://whathannahread.wordpress.com/2012/12/02/after-youd-gone-by-maggie-ofarrell/]