After You'd Gone

Item: After You'd Gone
Author: WhichBook

Maggie O'Farrell

This is a compulsive read with many mysteries running through it. Did Alice really mean to kill herself? What did she see in Edinburgh that drives her to this? And most importantly where has John, the love of her life, gone? This is an amazingly accurate account of that marvellous feeling when the world shifts, and you know that you are totally in love - and the gut-wrenching, grief than descends when that love is no more.

Extract

What can I say about the time that we spent in each other's lives? That we were happy. That we were barely apart. That, fleetingly, I would get that vertiginious, towering feeling of knowing another person so well that you could actually see what it would be like to be them. That I never felt complete before I met him but with him I felt finished, whole. What else? We lived in his house in Camden Town. I made him tidier, I painted the staircase blue, he eased my temper by laughing at me when I was in a rage. He cured my insomnia by reading to me in the middle of the night when he was half asleep.

Parallels