After You
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
On a tree-lined street in affluent Notting Hill, brilliant, beautiful Lucy Stafford was murdered in broad daylight while walking her 8-year-old daughter Sophie to school. Stunned, Lucy's best friend Ellie Lerner boards a plane to London for the funeral, leaving her husband, Phillip, behind, knowing only that she must spend time with her goddaughter. The little girl is in shock, and refuses to speak, while her father, Greg, withdraws into his own very private grief. Instinctively Ellie reaches for the classic book that gave her so much comfort when she was a child - The Secret Garden. As Ellie reads, the weeks pass and gradually the child begins to thaw. It is then that Ellie realizes she, too, has issues of her own that she must finally come to terms with: the still birth of her child, her true feelings for her husband, and a revelation about Lucy herself which sets Ellie reeling.
Filled with the loving and eccentric characters that made The Opposite of Love such a success, with wisdom far beyond her years, Julie Buxbaum has written a novel that explores the resilience of the heart, and the ability for books to reawaken the spirit.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Like her debut, The Opposite of Love, Buxbaum's second novel concerns a woman struggling with devastating loss. When American ex-pat Lucy Stafford is killed by a mugger, her lifelong best friend Ellie Lerner drops everything to fly to London. Ellie stays on after Lucy's funeral to care for her friend's eight-year-old daughter, Sophie, who witnessed her mom's violent death and has since retreated into silence. Ellie also worries about Lucy's husband, Greg, who confesses that he "can barely even look at" his daughter; her own divorced parents' on-again, off-again relationship; and her long-suffering husband, waiting for her in the Boston suburbs. Ellie finds London as much a refuge as a place of mourning; she's been unable to move past the birth of a stillborn child and feels the need to "borrow" Sophie. As she uncovers more of Lucy's life, Ellie finds her own spinning out of control, and soon she's forced to reassess even her deeply held certainties. Buxbaum skillfully handles this tale of grief and growing, resonant with realistic emotional stakes and hard-won wisdom.
