After This
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- € 14,99
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'The triumph of After This is its evocation of childhood ... McDermott's unshowy, succinct sentences summon up the flavour of the past when it was new' THE TIMES
'Sublime ... McDermott's simple prose is full of poetic distillations that capture a mood or a moment just so, and it all comes together in a radiant portrait of family life' DAILY MAIL
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A mesmerising and masterful novel of life for one American family during the mid-twentieth century
Alice McDermott's masterful novel is a portrait of a working-class American family. While Michael and Annie Keane taste the alternately intoxicating and bitter fruits of the sexual revolution, their older brother, Jacob, finds himself on the way to Vietnam. Clare, the youngest child, seeks to maintain an almost saintly innocence.
As their parents, John and Mary, struggle to uphold the family's framework, the four siblings are destined to experience the challenges and liberties of the 1960s. With McDermott's inimitable understanding and grace, After This captures the joy, sorrow, anger and love that underpin, and undermine, what it is to be a family.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A master at capturing Irish-Catholic American suburban life, particularly in That Night (1987) and the National Book Award winning Charming Billy (1998), McDermott returns for this sixth novel with the Keane family of Long Island, who get swept up in the wake of the Vietnam War. When John and Mary Keane marry shortly after WWII, she's on the verge of spinsterhood, and he's a vet haunted by the death of a young private in his platoon. Jacob, their first-born, is given the dead soldier's name, an omen that will haunt the family when Jacob is killed in Vietnam (hauntingly underplayed by McDermott). In vignette-like chapters, some of which are stunning set pieces, McDermott probes the remaining family's inner lives. Catholic faith and Irish heritage anchor John and Mary's feelings, but their children experience their generation's doubt, rebellion and loss of innocence: next eldest Michael, who had always dominated Jacob, drowns his guilt and regret in sex and drugs; Anne quits college and moves to London with a lover; Clare, a high school senior, gets pregnant. The story of '60s and '70s suburbia has been told before, and McDermott has little to say about the Vietnam War itself. But she flawlessly encapsulates an era in the private moments of one family's life.
